Insurance risk

Kirkmain

Maybe I am becoming cynical in my old age. But there is something about taking out home insurance that makes me anxious.

When speak to an insurance broker on the phone, am I not just providing them with a catologue of all the valuables in my home? What is stopping someone who works for a contents insurance firm from looking up which homes hold the most valuable contents and then tipping off their burglar mates down the pub for a cut of the proceeds?

MattMattMattUK

Kirkmain said:

Maybe I am becoming cynical in my old age. But there is something about taking out home insurance that makes me anxious.

When speak to an insurance broker on the phone, am I not just providing them with a catologue of all the valuables in my home? What is stopping someone who works for a contents insurance firm from looking up which homes hold the most valuable contents and then tipping off their burglar mates down the pub for a cut of the proceeds?

Data protection policies, access controls, management processes etc. Very few individuals will have free access to that data, all access will be logged, the majority of people will be automatically flagged up to compliance for attempting to look, let alone trying to do it on a large scale, also very few people have "burglar mates".

Usually if a burglar wants to steal expensive items they break into expensive homes, they tend to have far more of them and are almost always obvious from the value of the property. One of the others is ethnic targeting at certain religious/racial groups who tend to store large amounts of gold (often as jewellery) as it can be very easily sold as scrap. 

Brie

I think the very basic thing is that most people are honest.  Most wouldn't consider tipping off burglars and those who do consider criminal activity think better of it immediately.  I've worked in a number of low paid jobs in financial companies here and abroad and there always comes up the conversation at some point about how we could scam or make money and they always end the same way - it wouldn't be worth it for the pennies made from the thousands of cons one might need to do, only worth it if you could scam millions and you'd be sure to be caught either way so why bother.  

DullGreyGuy

Kirkmain said:

Maybe I am becoming cynical in my old age. But there is something about taking out home insurance that makes me anxious.

When speak to an insurance broker on the phone, am I not just providing them with a catologue of all the valuables in my home? What is stopping someone who works for a contents insurance firm from looking up which homes hold the most valuable contents and then tipping off their burglar mates down the pub for a cut of the proceeds?

Then go to somewhere like M&S Premier or Hiscox Standard which cover which has no specified sum insured and no single items have to be declared (they both cover up to £15,000 for a single item and cannot add higher value items).

Firstly, people will then have no idea what you have because nothing is declared. Secondly, if you go with Hiscox the same db will also contain their 505 and 606 customers which cover items up to £1m+ so even your £15k Rolex will be small fry compared to those customers. 


Sticking with regular insurers... because their systems don't have the function to search by value of contents. A call centre agent will be able to search by name, dob, postcode etc not all customers with a Rolex over £50,000. So your only risk is the agent that takes your call. Last time I went into a call centre for insurance no agents were allowed to take a phone, pen or paper into the room, bags had to be left in lockers. Each agent had an A5 dry wipe board and pen for making notes that were integrated into the desk. Manager is supposed to sweep their area at the end of the shift to ensure all boards have been cleaned. So you are down to someone memorising details. There's a reason why call centres are paralleled to sweatshops 


The only people who are going to be able to search for customers based on sums insured are the likes of Pricing Actuaries and Database Administrators. The former are on a six figure salary (in London) and would be barred for life being an actuary if they were caught. The second are likely to be in high 5 figure salaries and would be barred from working in Financial Services for as long as the rehabilitation of offenders act means its unspent.

The mate down the pub must be offering vast sums of money for this information for someone to be willing to risk their very well paid career for it. 

MattMattMattUK said:

Kirkmain said:

Maybe I am becoming cynical in my old age. But there is something about taking out home insurance that makes me anxious.

When speak to an insurance broker on the phone, am I not just providing them with a catologue of all the valuables in my home? What is stopping someone who works for a contents insurance firm from looking up which homes hold the most valuable contents and then tipping off their burglar mates down the pub for a cut of the proceeds?

Data protection policies, access controls, management processes etc. Very few individuals will have free access to that data, all access will be logged, the majority of people will be automatically flagged up to compliance for attempting to look, let alone trying to do it on a large scale, also very few people have "burglar mates".

If someone is accessing the data via the front end then absolutely it will all be logged and its likely Compliance or InfoSec may have flags for certain front end searches. 

I'm not an expert on IT Security but have historically been given privileged access to certain databases (often non-production nightly backups) and whilst they can see when I made a connection/logged off I don't believe the meta data stored would include every query I ran against the db.  Through that access in theory I could have ranked every policyholder by sum insured as of the day before but really I have better things to do with my time. For what I was doing I did search for all customers with over £250k within a certain cohort but it was for a legitimate purpose. 

The only thing I've ever been asked by IT security is about connections from outside the UK to the db and each time its been because I was working from overseas for a period and so confirmed it was me. Never asked why I was overseas or what data I was querying.