Hello,

I recently tried to renew insurance for my van, on telephoning the company i was with I was told that I had 3 claims on the cue database which tripled the cost of a new policy.

Having more than one person on the policy I could not be sure that this information was not correct and so allowed the company to cancel my insurance policy due to non disclosure of claims.

When I rang a different company to get a quote only one claim was present on the database.

The claim in question was supposedly ongoing at the time of talking to the first company but by the time I rang the second it had changed to an at fault, closed claim for near £600.

I do not believe this information to be true, I have received no mail regarding the claim and it was a very minor incident at slow speed with no real damage.

My new policy is now threatening to cancel due to non disclosure of claims.

I believe that 2 of the claims have been fabricated and the third has been exaggerated.

When I phone the company I am put of hold indefinatly.

What should I do?

How can I ensure that I get truthful information regarding the open/closed exaggerated claim?

You need to get hold of the claims information from the company the claims were with. How would you know whether they are correct or not and be able to correctly disclose them, if you don't have the information.

What is a puzzle to me is why you are not aware, as if you were the main policyholder, you would have been in contact with the Insurers or they Insurers would have contacted you, if they had received a claim from a third party.

See if you can find the Insurers complaints telephone number or email address and use that. It is going to be easier to get the information via a complaint, than it would be to submit a Data Protection subject access request.

Thank you for the reply.

To clarify, I was aware of the third claim as a claim in progress that had been ongoing for over 12 months, I had spoken to my insurers and given my account of the accident. It seemed a very small matter to me and I asked that I would pay for any damage to keep my NCB.

The other two claims were completely fabricated by the telesales person. I was unsure at the time of the phone call as there is more than one vehicle and driver and indeed policy involved although everything is in my name and, as you say, I would have expected to have been contacted in the case of a claim being made by a third party.

I had thought that it could have been another named driver trying to hide the fact that he had, had an accident from myself. I was able to establish that this was not the case.

That was the last that I had heard until the telesales person told me that I had a settled, at fault claim on the cue database.

I believe that the insurers probably convinced the guy to not pursue the claim, but can not be sure. I certainly do not believe that they would have paid out the sum recorded for the incident.

I believe that the telesales person who fabricated the two claims before cancelling my policy has somehow falsified the information on the cue database to show the claim as settled and paid out so that there is a reason to cancel the original policy. I hope that I am making sense.

I will start the complaints process against this company and see if I can get to the bottom of it.

So you admit that you had one of the accidents that you failed to disclose?

£600.00 is not a lot for a claim. Can you tell us a little bit more about what happened please?

Uncle B, I realise that you do not accept PM`s but I would like to send you something, a reply to this thread that I am worried may contain too much information to be made public.

If you are interested, and there is a way to accomplish this, pls let me know.

Thank you

Hello there.

If you send it to me, I'll forward it to UB. Please keep as much as you can on the thread.

HB

Thanks Honey Bee, that`s really helpful

The case is getting a bit complicated and there would be a lot of stuff to send, maybe I will wait a while and make sure it is absolutely necessary.

Thanks again

Hello again,

Can anybody tell me the best way to verify that a claim has been paid from my insurance to a third party?

Would my insurance company be able to falsify this type of document?

If I contacted the third parties insurance could/would they help me?

My insurance company has said that they have paid the claim but have apologised as it would seem that the claim is exaggerated and does not fit the description I gave in my accident report.

They have said that in light of my report the claim should probably have been investigated and the damage disputed. This was in response to my asking for evidence/pictures of the damage vehicle and evidence of the date of settlement.

Just send the Insurers a Data Protection Subject Access Request letter asking for copies of all the claims paperwork and system data held.

Click on subject access request for a template letter. You need to send the Insurers £10 for the admin fee that would be due to them for the request.

The Insurers should have been in contact with you regarding the claims and if they were not, then you would be justified in making a complaint, involving the FOS if necessary.

Thanks for the reply,

I think this case will be difficult to resolve and I may need to sent subject access requests to two or three companies. Not that that would be a problem. I am in the process of a formal complaint already should I get as much info as possible this way first or am I just wasting time in your opinion?

One more post until I can PM:)

Thanks for the reply,

 

I think this case will be difficult to resolve and I may need to sent subject access requests to two or three companies. Not that that would be a problem. I am in the process of a formal complaint already should I get as much info as possible this way first or am I just wasting time in your opinion?

 

One more post until I can PM:)

Who says anyone will answer a PM !

The other alternative is a subject access to the central claims database, but that will only give you the basic details and not what is contained on file at the Insurers. The advantage of an SAR to the Insurers should be that they provide ALL the information on their file. The only info the Insurers could keep from you is data relating to a third party, so they would not provide a third party claimants name. address, medical info if related to a PI claim. But everything else they have to disclose.

If you have people driving your vehicles and making claims on your behalf, you might also find out that as well. Perhaps other people have phoned the Insurers pretending to be you and if this is possible, you could ask for copies of any phone calls that were apparently with the policyholder.

Central claims database

http://www.insurancedatabases.co.uk/default.aspx

I would very much like to get hold of recordings of the telephone calls,

I would expect that the call where the two fabricated claims are discussed would disappear somehow, but I believe that I brought them up again when talking to the cancellation dept.

I do not think that this recording could go missing, I would expect that this recording constitutes the agreement of a contract cancellation and would need to be kept by the insurers?

I would very much like to get hold of recordings of the telephone calls,

 

I would expect that the call where the two fabricated claims are discussed would disappear somehow, but I believe that I brought them up again when talking to the cancellation dept.

 

I do not think that this recording could go missing, I would expect that this recording constitutes the agreement of a contract cancellation and would need to be kept by the insurers?

Insurers keep phone calls for atleast a couple of years, but it is not always that easy to access them. Depends on the Insurers system. Normally the Insurers IT system would have a log event which shows when the policy was accessed and who accessed it. Using that information, it is then normally possible to find the phone recording, if not deleted or not accessible.

If you believe that there are two fabricated claims on your record, you should write to the compliance/data protection officer at the Insurers, advising that you believe that the two records may be fraudulent, as you as the policyholder do not know about these. If the Insurers received a third party claim, they would write out to the Policyholder to get their side of the accident story. If they did not receive a response, they would then have to deal with the third party claim.

The fabricated claims existed in the phone calls only, when I contacted another broker they were not on the system. I am 100% sure of this since contacting my past insurance provider.

The difficulty is in obtaining truthful records of these phonecalls. They were made to a seperate broker and maybe not connected to a policy that ever went live.

However I do have a copy of the inflated quotation with the claims listed on it. I am worried that they may argue that I submitted the claims myself.

I believe that the broker in question did not realise that I had another policy with the same company and because of these claims he had to cancel that policy also.

Not being able to cancel the policy on the grounds of the fabricated claims he then had to cancel it due to the one real, in progress, claim that they are now withholding the settlement date information regarding.

This claim has been exaggerated and should have been challenged by my insurers on the grounds of not matching info from my accident report.

I believe that they rushed through the settlement after the phone call or maybe have still yet to settle the claim.

I hope that the claim should have been rejected altogether! The damage was a small scratch to the paintwork of a board, quite probably a wooden board, covering the place where the glass window should have been.

The insurers have no evidence or pictures of this damage they have already admitted that.

despite the claim being 15 months old

They have offered to let me pay 50% of the total claim amount to have it changed from an at fault to non fault claim on the system.

There is no further advice I can provide, without repeating myself. You need to get hold of the claims paperwork and see what is on there.

If this is a brokers involved, you could perhaps contact the Insurance underwriter directly to advise them that you are concerned about the conduct of the brokers. All sounds a bit fishy to me. Pay back 50% and they will change the claim status ? Odd !!!!!!

After the phone call to the broker when my policies were denied/cancelled I did something, that with hindsight, was stupid,

I had spoken to the one other driver on these policies and after establishing that there was definitly no more than one claim on the policy, he is a 55 year old trustworthy, professional tradesman that I have known all of my life, I decided that the insurers must have fabricated the claims and I was worried that the insurers were using this CUE database (I had never heard of it before these phone calls to the broker) to rip me off.

I did try to ascertain the truthful information regarding my claims but was unable to. I was either told the dates but nothing else, left on hold indefinitely or on another occasion I was told, the claim has been settled, you will lose your no claims bonus to which I replied "how much was the settlement". To which I was told "I am not sure but it may be £567." I had already started another policy before the no claims loss information came to light.

In conclusion I simply did not believe the information I was being given by the people responsible for handling these claims.

I therefore went about searching for an insurer that accepted online payments in the naive hope that they would be automated and not consult this database.

Although this was stupid you have to understand that these were commercial policies and I had been left with no vehicle at all with which to complete my commercial commitments.

This makes me sound like a big business, but I am not. I am a self employed roofer with a family and a mortgage. I did not have the funds to pay £1800 for insurance.

I did find such a company and insured both of my vehicles for the expected amount of money, around £350 each.

Obviously the new insurers were soon in touch and I had to disclose the claims on the database, now, instead of three, there was only one but it had changed from in progress as it had been a couple of days earlier to settled, at fault, £600.

I have paid the extra £200 per policy, if I had disclosed the claim from the start it would have only cost me maybe £30-£50 per policy.

I am also now worried that my no claims bonuses will be taken away, obviously I did not have this information to disclose at the time of ordering my new policies but this may again increase my premium.

What a mess, I hope this is clear enough for you guys to understand.

Sorry, I am writing this also to get the information straight in my own head.

I think you are right. I should request all info from all parties concerned via subject access request.

I guess that if I just pay the 50% cost i will keep my NCB and that will be the end of it for both me and the insurers which is tempting but I feel that they have more to gain from this arrangement than myself, indeed, something fishy going on.

Thanks for the reply,

 

I think this case will be difficult to resolve and I may need to sent subject access requests to two or three companies. Not that that would be a problem. I am in the process of a formal complaint already should I get as much info as possible this way first or am I just wasting time in your opinion?

 

One more post until I can PM:)

Hello again.

Why do you want advice by PM please? We are a public forum so that advice can be seen by a number of people who understand the problem, and as you will have read, users don't have to reply. Advice by PM is not recommended in any event unless information is seriously confidential.

I've already offered to act as intermediary; I would have thought that should be sufficient.

HB

Hi HB,

I understand your point, and have posted all information publicly now.

I was, at the time, referring to the fact that I had one more post until I can use you as an intermediary as I could not PM yourself either!

But, as I said, I have posted it publicly now and just hope I have not unintentionally posted anything that I should not have.

I do not intend to use PM now and UncleB`s account does not accept PM`s at all anyway I believe.

Thanks for your concern

I don`t know why but I just get the feeling that there are a lot of snooping insurance brokers frequenting this site, to be expected I suppose.

That was the reason that I wanted to PM UncleB, worried about giving a heads up to the moral-less, tele-fraud enemy.