Somehow my name and address has leaked out somewhere and a bunch of funking bar-stewards are setting up Car Insurance policies in my name, not paying for them, and then I spend many hours on the phone to Insurance Companies explaining the issue.
Some companies refer to their Fraud Teams pretty quickly, others treat my calls with suspicion asking for more an more details (and then probably doing nothing hoping it goes away)
I have now got a CIFAS flag on my Credit Report, which has stopped some of them, but not those coming through Third Party Insurance Brokers.
And now today, I have been refused extension to my existing Car Insurance policy – no change in circumstances, but the Insurance Company tell me “we have reviewed the risks, and are unable to offer you Insurance”.
I’m bloody annoyed!
I can’t be the only one suffering this – any advice or similar suggestions greatly accepted (becuase I’m running out of ideas and patience)
Bloody hell Rigid I’m sorry this has been done to you. I can’t offer anything other than support and this comment to give this thread a bump.
Cheers Moose – I’m a cynical old bark, don’t publish personal details anywhere (that I know of), ignore unsolicited emails and phone calls, generally keep things offline, yet somehow … this!
I’m getting balder as more letters land on the doormat saying “you owe us some money, can you please take another day off work to get this sorted”
That’s an absolute pisser, Rij.
Mrs F recently had her credit card scammed by Googling for a birthday present, failing to notice the gibberish URL, and entering her credit card number at the payment page. She was away working in Germany, and I didn’t give the poshly-spoken bloke who rang me up from Barclaycard her mobile number, but advised him to call back when she returned in a couple of days. By which time I’d rung up Barclaycard myself and had her card stopped, not before they’d repeatedly tried to spend £2,000 on it, to be told the posh bloke was actually a fraudster. When he did ring back, I loudly called him “a scamming c*nt” before he had a chance to put the phone down.
Her credit card is linked to my account, so my card was stopped as well. You don’t know how many things rely on repeat fees until it goes wrong – Dodgers, car and house insurance, mobile phone contracts, etc, etc.
Sheesh – sadly easy to get caught, and the fallout takes a lot of effort to fix.
Hopefully you’re getting it all back together fro the highly important dodger payments.
A seemingly innocuous mis-step can have far reaching implications (as I’m now discovering with limited choice on comparethemarket …)
I will be shouting (or nearly shouting, just being very straightforward) with the insurance company tomorrow. Will it solve anything. One can hope …
Unrelated, but my car insurance renewal went up by 60%. As I now entirely WFH so barely use it, I can only assume my driveway has become 60% more dangerous. Unlikely, as my house & contents insurance went up by less than 1%.
When I rang my insurer (no names, but I rang their phone line direct) to cancel it, I was given a “valued customer discount” meaning it only went up about 30%. They’re all c*nts, even the legal ones.
60% increase here as well.
Bloody ridiculous. I drive an 8 year old car with 105k on the clock worth about £7k and drive about 8000 miles a year which is mostly carrying my kids around as a taxi service.
Hmm … maybe I’m falsely connecting the fraud I’m seeing with Mrs Ds refused insurance.
It’s a limited mileage policy as she does nowt more than go to work a couple of times a month, so maybe the insurance company just can’t be arsed with it anymore.
My policy is due in May, I’m now expecting a 60% hike too
I questioned the 60% increase and was told it was due to sharp rise in the price of repairs, due to increased garage labour costs (all those Polish mechanics went back home) and imports of parts from overseas. Br*x*it bonus, in other words. Thanks, BoJo.
There was also a new law introduced a year or two back to prevent existing customers paying more while insurance companies gave new customers loss-leader premiums. But surely that would mean new customers paid more and existing ones paid less?
I don’t know if everything is necessarily Brexit related. Over here there is a sharp increase in the number of vehicles being stolen, which has put rates up.
The catalytic converter theft phenomenon must have had an effect, though that seems to have died down now.
What about these wee tykes with the VW badges?
This rapping music’s to blame, mark my words
Audi badges make great knuckle dusters too..
The big hike in renewal price is standard car insurance company practice.
They always offer a lower price when you contact them, but you’ll usually find a better offer from someone else if your driving record is clean (-ish) and you’re prepared to spend the time looking.
They are all bastards. It’s the business model that they follow.
I had someone clone my credit card a good few years back and fortunately I spotted it early. My bank suspended the account immediately when I contacted themand issued me a new card with a new number. Still took several months of “investigation” before they closed the old one completely, though.
I no longer have any credit cards, preferring to keep a “float” in my current account instead. If I don’t think I can afford to pay for something outright, then I don’t get it.
I realise going without credit cards is not an option for some people, though.
No experience of persistent identity fraud, so I have no advice to give on that subject. Hope it gets resolved.
Years back, when shops used to put your credit card on a little device that used a roller thingamajig across the raised letters on the card to print a receipt, I had my details scammed by a takeaway in Bristol and passed on to another shop in the same business group.
I’d never bothered to check my statement closely before, but for some uncanny reason I did later the same month and discovered a Chicken Tikka massala with all the available side dish trimmings and a couple of beers that I’d bought from a similar establishment in Manchester. As it had been roughly 20 years at that point since I’d been in that city, I smelled a rat.
I got the money back, and hopefully some fraud team somewhere nailed the f*ckers who’d done it. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s just got a lot easier for the scurvy knaves to do it.
That’s why those portable card readers were invented. So you never need to lose sight of your card or let it out of your posession while you paid.
In the days before chip and PIN, when you had to hand your card over to the cashier/waiter to process it under the counter or even in another room, dodgy people would scan it once on the company’s scanner and then scan it again on a reader of their own, which would save all the details to be put onto a clone card later.
Oh, I never lost sight of the card, that wasn’t the issue. They’d just take the details from the carbon copy receipt they kept and phone them through to their mates. No electronics involved, just simple dishonesty hoping to avoid detection through a combination of security by obscurity and user laziness and inertia.
Don’t they have to give some form of payment detail when they open the account? Maybe call your bank and see if they can help?
True, but not sure it’s true via broker/third party. All the insurance company has is my name and address so they’re chasing me.
Did have one search on my Credit Report using a bank account I didn’t recognise, so the CIFAS flag is doing something
Very sorry to read about these ghastly scams you’ve suffered Rigid Digit and fentonsteve.
What a bloody nightmare! Hope you both manage to sort it all out.
Ian Dury said it best in the first line of Plaistow Patricia: Arseholes, bastards, fucking c**nts and pricks…
I hope it gets sorted out eventually for both of you. Nobody needs this kind of shit – life’s stressful enough as it is.
Thanks, Mike (and KFD). It was a credit card, nothing was taken (the multiple £2,000 Am*z*n voucher purchases alerted the fraud team) and if anything had been taken we’d have been able to mark it as dodgy, fill out a form, and not pay it.
Mrs F didn’t ever have a credit card (on principle of ‘never a borrower nor lender be’), so I got her one linked to mine, for exactly this reason – I didn’t want her using our joint bank account debit card for online purchases. Turns out I was right.
But it is a pain in the bum, all the same.
Awful story – sorry if I’m a bit thick but why do people set up false car insurance policies and then pay no premiums? What for?
That I’m not totally sure about. Most likely the Ghost Broker scam (below).
Ghost Brokers coining it in, and then innocents unknowingly left with no Car Insurance
Sounds as if you are a victim of something called “ghost broking”
– article about the practice here
https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/fraudsters-took-out-car-insurance-in-my-wifes-name-aQctG0a6IZVP
Would appear so, and seemingly no surefire way of preventing it.
I have had one or other of my cards cloned at least 5 times maybe more. Whilst it is a pain in the ass any money taken out of the accounts has always been paid back.
On the whole I would prefer more effort being spent on preventing fraud rather than ridiculous speed camera fines which are nothing more than money making scams that piss off motorists.
Having done an online speed awareness course only yesterday (three hours I’ll never get back) I am temporarily in a position to disagree with you before I forget it all again. Some of the facts about stopping distances and injury potential were shocking. As for the money-making bit, as long as your offence is minor and you’re not taking the piss you’re offered the choice of the course to dodge the fines and the points. So not a very effective scam, although you day have to pay £90 for the test. While I don’t want to come all Extinction Rebellion on yo ass, I don’t think pissing off motorists is the main issue.
Speed awareness courses. I used to work in a place where these things were delivered and overheard two guys talking sullenly about their experiences. “How many of these you been on?”, “Three”, “Me, five”
Er, these courses aren’t working are they?
Of course not. It was my second, as I hinted above. Five is ridiculous. But there are a couple of things that will stay with me, I hope. And no fine and no points is always welcome.
It’s all pretty irrelevant to me right now anyway, because my car was one of three parked outside my building that was trashed by a drunk driver a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be written off, and I’m going back to Oz in a few weeks anyway so I’ll take the ££. Tough on my daughter and s-i-l, because they’ve been using the car for the 9 months I’m not around. Maybe they’ll just have to buy their own car…
If you are offered a speed awareness course instead of points on your licence, you won’t be offered another one if you reoffend within 3 years. Your details are kept on file. Many insurance companies want to know if you’ve had to do one and being caught lying about it would invalidate your insurance.
The threshold for being offered a speed awareness course is being roughly 10 percent or less over the limit. Any more and you won’t get the offer. In some areas it appears to be a lower threshold than that.
I had to do one online (during lockdown #2 – A Zoom meeting) and found it very informative. There was a lot of information i’d forgotten about since passing my test nearly 40 years ago and also a lot of stuff that they just didn’t cover back then. It’s made me more careful and more aware of what’s going on around me when I drive.
SA courses for a lot of people are like these Equality and Diversity programmes that they put police on – sit everyone in a room, death by powerpoint, questionnaire at the end and the boxes are ticked and the “problem is solved”. Except it isn’t. I have GCSE French but it means nothing – I can’t actually speak French, partly as I don’t want to because I would sound stupid. I don’t where I’m going with this.
I have Religious Instruction o-level but I still don’t know whether I’m going up or down.
Sadly, Steve Harley isn’t around any more to offer instruction.
Just drive slower, end of problem. There are hardly any speed cameras here and the roads are getting incredibly dangerous. I would give up driving if I could. Incredibly expensive and at times a horrible experience. One of my plans for retirement is to live somewhere where I don’t need a car.
Same in Oz. Too many hard-of-thinking knuckleheads think an 80kph speed limit means it’s compulsory to drive at 80kph, and if you’re driving slower than that for any reason you must be run off the road. I sound like an old person, don’t I?
80kph here means minimum 100 pretty much. If you are not doing that you will be dangerously overtaken on the inside, all to get to the next red light 5 seconds earlier
Oh how I wish we could get a couple of speed cameras in our village. But I wouldn’t fine the offenders they caught. I’d crush their cars, make them watch the crushing and take away their licences.
What I still don’t understand when it comes to scams is why they cannot trace the perpetrators. Most of the scams require the transfer of money electronically from bank accounts etc etc which all leave a very solid electronic trail.
Even if the money is transferred overseas, it is usually to reputable banking / financial institutions which should be able to trace any transaction and (a) get the money back and (b) figure out who is behind it. Is it that difficult for countries to work together on systems to enable this ?
About 20 years ago, my credit card was skimmed at my local petrol station, as I filled up on my way to work. By that afternoon I had a call from Barclaycard asking if I was in an Indian restaurant attempting to pay for six meals. Nope, I was in the office making a cup of tea.
My card had by then been used to buy a large flat-panel TV from Amazon to be delivered to the crim’s home address, and he’d used it to sign up to a full Sky package.
You’d have thought this would have been straightfoward enough for Plod to follow when the Sky dish installation van went to install the dish. But apparently not.
If we can’t get joined-up thinking between two different addresses in Cambridge, I don’t hold out much hope for overseas cooperation.
That reminds me of when I had just started working after Uni and was living in West Didsbury, Manchester, I had a break in at the flat and they took the TV. The local plod came to assess and the officer said that I could probably find it for sale in the local pub at the weekend – if that’s the case, why couldn’t they attend and catch who did it ?
Mind you, it was an old TV that my gran gave me and one of the colour guns didn’t work and so everything was green on screen, Whoever bought it in the pub was in for shock.
Sadly scams of multifarious types are all too common and only likely to increase.
One evening in October 2022 my quiet existence was disturbed by my doorbell’s chime. Upon opening my street door I was surprised to find a courier from DPD standing there. He had a delivery for me which struck me as unusual as I wasn’t expecting one. He required photo ID so I duly showed him an old passport. The package changed hands and I took the small but weighty parcel into my kitchen and unwrapped it. It was an iPhone 14 along with a Sky sim card. This was decidedly odd. Occasionally a pleased patron will send me a small gift as a sort of bonus but that is often a CD or a bottle of booze an iPhone was far too extravagant. I phoned Sky. I explained what had occurred to very pleasant young woman who moved me on to their fraud team. I explained again. Sky informed me that this was a scam and an account had been set up with them in my name. They immediately cancelled that account and advised me to notify my bank and to take out protective registration with Cifas. They went on to tell me that they would send me everything I would require to return the phone to them. They told me not to worry as my prompt action would have stymied the lowlife arsewipes nefarious doings. I rang off and phoned my bank, reported the scam to Action Fraud then set myself up with Cifas. Two days later upon checking my post I found a Royal Mail returns label. No envelope just the label. Someone must have just put it through my letterbox. It was for an address in Birmingham so I looked it up on Google Maps. It was a bog standard suburban street containing bog standard semi-detached houses. I phoned Sky again to let them know. It was of course part of the scam. These morons hope that the people they annoy with this crap will simply post the phone back to a prearranged address where they will hang around outside hoping to intercept the postie and claim their prize. Idiots.
The next day the kosher label arrived from Sky. I returned the phone to them.
Needless to say I keep a very close eye on my banking, credit rating, etc since this occurred. It also means I have reduced my presence on the net and tightened up my security as much as possible. I recommend everyone do likewise.
All your iPhone are belong to us.
Sorry to hear that Ridge. Some scrote opened two bank accounts in my name right before Christmas, I assume hoping I wouldn’t notice. I spent most of a day getting them closed and doing the various reports etc. For info Halifax were a miracle of efficiency and had already flagged it as “dodgy”. TSB were a shambles and were still writing to me 2 weeks later saying they were closing the account (having previously said it was closed). No repercussions yet but I always feel a touch anxious when a pile of letters arrive.
I’m getting the anxiety “oh what now?” is the most uttered phrase in the house at the moment
Exactly.
That’s shit. Nothing useful to add other than I hope you get it sorted.
There’s an ad on this weeks WIYE from a company that deals with all this kind of stuff.