Just looking for some advice regarding a car insurance application. Sorry for the long post.
What should have been a simple purchase of a car has turned into a bit of a saga. Bear with me as it is a long one.
This starts with finding a nice Automatic Mini Clubman on eBay for my wife and contacting the seller on Sunday 26th June arranging a viewing, My wife in anticipation found quotes through compare the market the same day.
The next day we traveled from the North East to Carlisle, viewed the car which she also test drove and all was fine. My wife paid for the car £4600 by bank transfer and then went to tax the car and activate the insurance from one of the quotes provided from the meerkats.
The transactions for the insurance and tax were made by my wife using my phone and the payments came out of our joint bank account as she had lost signal on her phone. We are on different networks.
All looked good until we got a couple of miles down the road when from my car I noticed white smoke billowing from the mini’s exhaust. We turned round and returned to the seller. Give him his dues, he was great. He said he would arrange a mechanic and could we give him a couple of days.
On the Wednesday the seller contacted us that the Mini probably needed new valve seats. He said he was into the car for £4100 and he would either refund £500 and get the car over to us from Carlisle on a trailer for us to look to fix or refund the £4600 we had paid. My wife decided she wanted the refund. He was good to his word and refunded the money.
My wife contacted the insurance company to advise she needed to cancel the policy and was informed she would incur a £50 charge or if she was actively still looking for a car the policy could be put on hold and a £25 charge would be made to transfer the insurance to a new vehicle with any difference to be paid.
We had a viewing for another car so she decided to take the second option.
However, on the Thursday she then received an email from the insurance company saying the following.
Following routine checks, it has emerged that your policy is linked to multiple car insurance application and could have been taken out by an unauthorised third party. We view this as potential misrepresentation and therefore in 7 days time your policy will be cancelled from the date it began.
My wife contacted the insurance company and was told the decision would not be overturned and she had to submit a complaint which she did that day.
Given this cancellation of the Policy, I contacted my insurance company and advised everything that had happened. My insurer has now contacted me to say my policy will not be renewed given the information which has been shared by the other insurance company. We currently have both submitted Data Subject Access Request forms to the company Synectics Solutions which we have been told holds the information insurance companies share.
To bring everything up to date she has received a reply from the insurance company to say it will not overturn its decision. She again contacted them and was told that she was linked to multiple car insurance applications and she should contact Action Fraud. Asked what should she tell action fraud as to what was the fraud she was told that she was linked to multiple car insurance policies. When asked what were these policies she was told that the information could not be shared.
I therefore got her to email to say I would deal with on her behalf. I got through to a manager who listened to the full story. I have got a little bit more information and it appears the tech department has linked the IP address from my phone to other car insurance applications.
Apart from our current car we have no other car insurance. I am the main policyholder and my wife is the additional driver. On the policy for the Mini, she would have been the main policyholder and I would have been the additional driver. We have had this arrangement previously on cars we have owned and have never had problems with insurance.
I have been racking my brain as to the IP addresses. I have Nord VPN on my phone but I cannot remember if this was on when she activated the policy from my phone. We can evidence all the transactions we made were in Carlisle when we purchased the car so to be continually told the policy was taken out potentially by an unauthorised third party totally flummox’s me.
Another thing I have noted is that my wife used the Safari Browser on my phone and I have the iCloud Private Relay activated which keeps your internet activity private.
It appears whatever the IP addresses which were linked to our transaction are also linked to other car insurance applications. I have asked for the IP addresses so I can address this in a complaint to the financial ombudsman but these will not be shared.
I have worked in Law Enforcement for some time and I cannot get my head round how an insurance company can make an arbitrary decision without actually investigating it and then not share any information. My own insurance company has at least asked me to provide further information so they can make an informed decision.
Has anyone had something similar with financial companies? I use VPN’s to protect our security but it appears this has activated the algorithm’s within the insurance companies systems to our detriment and trying to get a human to actually investigate this is nigh on impossible.
Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated.
Blimey what a shambles.
Sorry about all that.
Not sure why you contacted your insurer but I guess that's water under the bridge now.
In your shoes I'd give it another go trying to sort it out, and after that id seriously consider getting a broker to help you out.
No relationship, but I've used Reich in Manchester in the past and they were good guys
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Last edited by xxnick1975; 12th July 2022 at 22:58.
Financial Services Ombudsman?
https://www.financial-ombudsman.org....otor-insurance
Sounds like a complete nightmare, I can understand you informing your own insurance, but it clearly hasn't been beneficial in this instance. Good luck.
Sounds a total nightmare, I agree with you it does not make much sense. Surely everyone's does the same when buying a car or even when looking around at prices at renewal time. The IP thing is a weird one, for instance this year I did the quote at home then took out the policy at my work. Both times the IP address would have been different, then I did a compare the market on my phone, so I would have had 3 different IP address. I cant see how they can say what you did was fraud and cancel your policy.
The bigger ongoing issue as you found when contacting your insurance company is once you tick that box at the bottom of every application that says "have I ever had a policy cancelled or declined" you will struggle to get another policy or the prices will be very high.
Have you tried getting car insurance elsewhere since this started?
If I'm misreading this, sorry, but what happens when 5 people in the same household are doing separate car insurance using the same IP. 5 might be extreme but I'd wager 2 or 3 policy holders with the same IPs must be common?!
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Wow. Something certainly amiss here and as Nik states above, an absolute nightmare.
The IP address is confusing. Likewise done several quotes on different computers, reviewed, edited, saved etc. Never any issues and seems to be a normal process of obtaining different prices from various platforms. Soft credit searches will have been recorded but again fairly common I would have thought especially if only the one policy has been activated.
Do wonder if it relates to a number if policies being taken out on the same car? Potentially current owner, your wife (seller didn’t cancel their policy), then buyer 3 comes along following your rejection and activates a policy. Probably barking up the proverbial, but it’s going to be something that’s raised a flag and just needs the autonomy of an agent to look beyond the metrics of the computer.
The lack of engagement over the phone to identify and express the true reasons for the cancellation isn’t great. The fact that your insurers are following a similar line of silence suggests it’s industry practice. Guess it’s a waiting game. When you are in receipt of the disclosure information, I suspect the issue will be clear and hopefully it’s an error that can be be rectified and reversed. Will be interested to see the outcome though. I’m intrigued but equally concerned that any one of us using comparison sites could encounter a similar scenario if it’s something that could be considered banal.
Very best of luck. Hope you don’t suffer financially as a result but the Ombudsman may need contacting.
You will get an IP address from your ISP that in unique to you during your ‘lease’ if you have a dynamic IP address, or permanent if you have a static one.
If you go through a VPN you ISP assigned IP address is used for the link between you and the VPN server. From there numerous users are bundled together into a single IP address.
Ne’er do wells often use a VPN for their nefarious activities to mask their Rey identity. I’ve been some sites block me from accessing them via a VPN saying that the IP is banned. This usually fixed by changing to another VPN server on the list.
It sounds like you have been very unfortunate and inadvertently been caught up in some scam hitting insurers at the moment.
It sounds like they are being unreasonable I’m not listening to you. If you can’t get them to resolve your issue the next place I would go to is the ombudsman.
Thank you for all your replies. They were all very much appreciated.
It looks like it has been resolved. The insurance company have shifted the blame to the third party company who has supplied the information. It appears my device was linked through the IP address to two other insurance applications submitted by other applicants.
The third party company who provided the information kept stating their data was correct. It was only after I got to speak to a manager in the insurance department who then took it forward and investigated what had happened.
It turns out the insurance company are not best pleased with the third party as it now appears their data was incorrect and has affected two other customers who had their insurance cancelled at the same time as my wife's. The investigation has been widened as the insurance company want the third party to ensure this has not affected any more of their customers.
I must admit, once I got past the first line support the insurance company have been great. They are updating the insurance databases to remove any records of the cancellation and are supplying documents which I can give to my insurance company. They are also looking to donate to a charity of my wife's choice and are sending her a bunch of flowers.
It just shows you how living in a tech world can cause such problems.
Thanks again.
Pleased you got it sorted.
Your last sentence is both ominous and astute.
The privatisation and monetisation of all aspects of life via tech is a frightening development and one that gets very little attention, when the reality is, it's a massive issue.
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Glad it was sorted out in the end, would have been a frustrating experience.
On the topic of the intrusion of tech and algorithms into people's life's this was an interesting read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...th-destruction
That really was quite an alarming read. So good to hear it is sorted and didn't become a long term issue, I guess the risk would have been you'd have become uninsurable, which is pretty shocking.
Cheers Nick. It definitely causes me to think in the future how I use my technology, especially when I am interacting with companies. I have noticed, especially with live chats thinking to myself if it is actually a person I am conversing with or is it just a very clever bot.Originally Posted by xxnick1975
Cheers, will definitely read that one. Even in my own work automated decision making has taken over a few of the current work streams. I am not informed enough to know the algorithm's behind them but have seen the impact assessments that complement them. It is a balancing act to keep them ethical and not discriminatory as they constantly need to be kept up to date. Thanks again for the recommendation.
Further to that, how does IP addressing work for cell phones? Would all phones using the same cell, share the same IP address (or block of IP addresses)?
No. Each mobile phone will have its own IP address assigned to it. These are dynamically assigned, in a similar manner to DHCP, and not fixed to a device.
It's not just the algorithms. It's the take over by Tech of everything - you want to go to a football match, you need to need to register on a app to download your tickets, at the stadium you want a drink, contactless only, park your car at the ground, parking app. Every aspect of your private life tracked and monitored by unaccountable corporates.
All fine whilst benign but things change, see COVID and war in Ukraine, things go wrong - see this thread, I'm a rational guy but honestly think we are sleep walking into a load of trouble
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