Perculiar car insurance glitch?

allan1983

Hi Guys.
Im currently trying to find cheaper car insurance, as my renewal has gone up by around 30%, even though all I have done is added a years no claims to my policy. (it also went up by 100% last year again with no claims, new points etc, but thats another story!)

So I have come across a site after using Argos Compare (clutching at straws by this point!) called insure.co.uk.
Although their qoute is slightly more than my renewal, the site was quite nice to use and was easy to tweak various things to see if i could get the price down.

My car is (AFAIK) worth £4000. I adjusted the figure to £3000, and the Price went UP? Then i moved it to £6000 and the price went DOWN?!?!

So obviously I then started really messing about with the worth of the car, and if I set it at £18000 (its a 4 year old Punto BTW) I can actually get the price to around £100 less than if I set it at its true market value.

2 Questions: WHY?!?!
and is it legal to over value your car if it means you get a better deal on insurance??

As Always, Thank in advance
Allan

raskazz

There are likely to be two factors interacting here:

1) A lot of insurers do not like insuring "old bangers", as results in this sector are often poor, hence they increase rates at the low value end of the scale to price themselves out.

2) Hastings (parent of insure.co.uk) operate a panel of insurers. Some insurers will not quote low-value cars at all, hence the lower rate at the higher value end may just be the appearance of an insurer who was not quoting at all for the lower values.

As to whether it is legal, I haven't seen any case studies. If your tweaks are picked up as an alert from a keylogger, then you will have difficulty in explaining the amendments that you have made in any way other than naked underwriting fraud.

allan1983

thanks Raskazz
Ive just checked, and for both extremes, the insurer was 'Advantage Insurance Company'

Fair comment on the risk of a keylogger, but if I was to go through the whole comparison process again and put the value at lets say £6000 (what I originally paid), if that does represent on overvaluation of the car, is this indeed fraud?

mikey72

raskazz wrote: »

There are likely to be two factors interacting here:

1) A lot of insurers do not like insuring "old bangers", as results in this sector are often poor, hence they increase rates at the low value end of the scale to price themselves out.

2) Hastings (parent of insure.co.uk) operate a panel of insurers. Some insurers will not quote low-value cars at all, hence the lower rate at the higher value end may just be the appearance of an insurer who was not quoting at all for the lower values.

As to whether it is legal, I haven't seen any case studies. If your tweaks are picked up as an alert from a keylogger, then you will have difficulty in explaining the amendments that you have made in any way other than naked underwriting fraud.

Which companies use keyloggers?
Is it a common practice by insurers now?

raskazz

allan1983 wrote: »

thanks Raskazz
Ive just checked, and for both extremes, the insurer was 'Advantage Insurance Company'

Fair comment on the risk of a keylogger, but if I was to go through the whole comparison process again and put the value at lets say £6000 (what I originally paid), if that does represent on overvaluation of the car, is this indeed fraud?

Insurers also cross-reference quote details in addition to keylogging individual quotes, so it would still probably get picked up on.

Whether you can answer the value question as £6000 depends upon how the question is worded. If it is worded "what was the purchase price" then you will be answering correctly and honestly.

On the other hand, if it is worded "what is the current value of your vehicle" then you are knowingly giving a false answer purely to reduce the premium. Which is fraud.

raskazz

mikey72 wrote: »

Which companies use keyloggers?
Is it a common practice by insurers now?

It's certainly common practice amongst aggregators. In my experience most insurers who allow quote and buy online and who have a proper counter-fraud strategy will use keylogging and/or quote cross-referencing to some degree.

My employer uses it although I'm not going to publicly announce who I work for on here. I know that Admiral are famously hot on keylogging and so-called "quote massaging". As are LV I believe.

Here's one provider of such solutions: http://www.redeye.com/services/analytics/risk-assessment/

mikey72

I suppose I'll be tagged as I always put their own customer service email and phone number in for dummy quotes. It's about the only thing that stays the same though, until I take out the insurance for real, weeks later.

System

I emailed confused.com customer services to point out that some of their panel of insurers block quotes if you make too many changes using the comparison site to see what happens to the quote when things change.
I also asked why the comparison site forces you to enter a valid address which prevents you doing "what-if" dummy type comparisons.

Confused replied to say that the valid address is needed to allow the insurers to give an accurate quote and they would not be willing to change this so that anonymous comparisons can be requested.

Therefore, be aware that when you do try alternative values on dummy comparison quotes, the address you use on the comparison may be used to link the quotes and some insurers may start to block future quotes once you exceed their number of attempts.

Also, if you use an address that is not your own, then who's address are you going to use, and would you be happy for someone to use your address in this way ?

Note, the same applies to the majority of these comparison sites.

mikey72

I use any nearby address, my specific postcode has at least 20 different options, and changing one or two characters is still close enough, and includes most of the local area then if I want a specific quote.
If it's to check out different options, I tend to use the insurers own potcode first anyway.
I'm sure other people must use mine, so I don't mind. If the insurers don't want to quote me for that, there's enough others out there scrambling to sell to me.