Watchdog dogged by unsolicited insurance quotes

Sept. 17--I disregarded the first unsolicited insurance quote in my email last month without much thought. I figured it just slipped past my spam filter.

But the emails kept coming, as well as letters and even a phone call.

The total at the end of about a week was five auto insurance quotes from State Farm, three from Nationwide and one from autoinsurancequotes.com. Allstate sent a life insurance quote. All were addressed to my wife, who hadn't requested them.

We wondered whether it was related to an auto insurance claim we'd settled recently, but it doesn't appear so.

Rather, it seems some lowlife submitted at least one bogus online application for quotes in my wife's name. Thankfully, while chasing this down was annoying, no harm was done, at least none we've discovered yet.

But I felt this was worth sharing for a few reasons.

One, it's not an isolated incident. Secondly, there's nothing you can do to prevent it.

It happened to a co-worker not too long ago. The state Insurance Department has received sporadic inquiries about it. People have complained to the Better Business Bureau, too.

When I inquired into the quote from autoinsurancequotes.com, I got a response from insuranceQuotes, a Denver company affiliated with Bankrate, an aggregator of financial rate information.

Tyler McCollum, an onboarding specialist at insuranceQuotes, told me "an anonymous person submitted some partially correct information through one of our public websites" that indicated my wife sought a quote.

"There is not currently a way to prevent this from happening the first time," he said. "Once it has been reported, we do put a block on related information for 60 days to prevent duplicate requests. As we do not ask for the identity of the person completing the form, assuming it to be the one whose name is given, it is not possible to determine the identity of that person."

It might be possible, though, to identify the IP address of the computer used to submit the application. McCollum ignored my question about that.

He told me he wouldn't be concerned about this being identity theft. He said Social Security numbers and credit card information are not required when requesting a quote.

McCollum sent me the bogus application that supposedly triggered all of this. My wife's name, address and email address were correct. The phone number, birth date, marital status, occupation, education level and vehicle information were fake (thankfully, because this applicant sounds like a real loser based on their demographics).

With all of the public information available about us, you'd think insurance companies would have a way to make sure a person's identity and demographics match up before they waste time sending a quote, or paying for a bad lead.

But that doesn't occur until the formal underwriting process.

State Farm, AllState and Nationwide told me their agents sent the quotes based on leads they'd received.

Allstate said its lead came from www.autoinsurancequotes.com. Nationwide said its lead came from www.netquote.com. State Farm said its lead came from www.insurancequotes.com.

NetQuote is a brand of insuranceQuotes, according to the company's Better Business Bureau report. Autoinsurancequotes.com must be connected to insuranceQuotes, too, since it responded to my questions.

Consumers who get unsolicited quotes should contact the agent to ask where the lead was obtained and follow up with that source, State Farm spokesman Dave Phillips told me. Each of the insurers stopped sending quotes when we asked, though a few new offers have rolled in from other insurers since that first wave.

The state Insurance Department has had a few informal complaints about unsolicited quotes like the ones my wife received, spokesman Ron Ruman told me.

"It's way down on the list in terms of complaints," he said. "It doesn't seem to be widespread."

Others have complained to the Better Business Bureau about unsolicited quotes stemming from NetQuote.

"NetQuote has no checks and balances in their system to substantiate that the inquiries are legitimate," one person wrote in a complaint filed in June. "Anyone can load your information into their system. From that point your info is delivered to several telemarketing cos./insurance agencies. You get called over and over again."

If anyone else has gone through this, let me know. I never resolved a few inconsistencies.

The phony application sought a quote on a vehicle we don't own. Yet the quotes we received from State Farm and Nationwide had our correct vehicles on them. And why did Allstate send a life insurance quote?

The application also didn't include our correct home phone number, yet my wife got a call from Nationwide.

Somewhere along the line, someone did enough research to fill in the blanks, but not enough to verify the application was bogus.

You always should check into oddities such as this, to make sure your identity hasn't been stolen or someone isn't doing something costly or nefarious in your name. If you believe someone is committing insurance fraud or if you keep receiving unsolicited quotes after asking agents to stop sending them, contact the state Insurance Department at 877-881-6388 or www.insurancepa.gov.

The Watchdog is published Thursdays and Sundays. Contact me at watchdog@mcall.com, 610-841-2364 or The Morning Call, 101 N. Sixth St., Allentown, PA, 18101. I'm on Twitter @mcwatchdog and Facebook at Morning Call Watchdog.

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