As the cost of living continues to rise, so too does the desire to find a cheap insurance deal. And using an insurance broker to compare policies across providers and secure coverage at the most competitive rates has become standard.
Unfortunately, this desire for a bargain has also created the opportunity for a growing form of insurance fraud: ghost broking.
Ghost brokers pose as legitimate insurance intermediaries, offering policies at significantly reduced prices – often through social media. Victims believe they are purchasing genuine insurance, only to later discover the policy is invalid, altered or cancelled entirely.
Ghost broking is most commonly associated with motor insurance. Aviva reports a 22% increase in cases since 2023, with fraudsters frequently targeting young drivers searching for cheaper cover online. However, similar tactics are increasingly appearing across other insurance products.
For victims, the consequences include financial losses, legal penalties and exposure of personal data. For insurers, ghost broking creates operational and reputational risks, as well as the cost of investigations and cancelled policies.
In response, we are seeing insurers explore new ways to uncover ghost broking activity by looking at existing data through a different lens. Our work, focused on fraud in contact centres, provides a clear example of this.
Telephony signals reveal ghost broking activity
Fraudsters, including ghost brokers, will often contact organisations by phone at some point, making the contact centre a valuable and often overlooked source of intelligence. Analysis from one of our insurance clients found that, of the suspicious calls they identified, investigators confirmed 58% were linked to ghost broking.
Even where ghost brokers begin applications online, they will often switch to phone channels to exploit weaker authentication or payment controls. Combined with tactics such as number spoofing or withheld caller IDs, these weaknesses make telephony an attractive and relatively low-friction route for fraud.
Insurers see ghost brokers using contact centres at multiple stages of their activity, including setting up new policies, making changes or initiating payments. While individual calls may appear legitimate, analysing multiple interactions can reveal suspicious patterns.
In practice, these patterns appear as calls from the same phone numbers relating to different policies, sometimes across multiple companies. Once a contact centre team spots a single suspicious call, they can use it as a starting point: identifying the number and linking it to activity on other policies during investigations.
Smartnumbers customers have an advantage when investigating these types of cases because the platform can identify the true phone number used to call the contact centre, even when the caller attempts to hide it by withholding it. Once identified, the number can be checked against internal denylists as well as telephony fraud intelligence shared by other organisations using the Smartnumbers platform.
This enables them to uncover connected behaviour, identify repeat actors and catch suspicious activity early, helping to stop ghost broking schemes before they escalate.
Shared intelligence
This ability to link activity from a single data point is even more powerful when applied across organisations. In fact, one recent analysis of our insurance customer data showed that around a third of the fraud they identify originates from phone numbers that were first flagged as suspicious by banks. That kind of overlap highlights both how fraudsters operate at scale and why cross-sector intelligence matters.
A recent news story on the sentencing of a father-and-son ghost broking operation further highlights this, with the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB) linking them to 52 fraudulent motor insurance policies across four insurers.
Our clients recognise the importance of monitoring activity across policies, organisations and sectors to detect repeat offenders, connect related activity and enable earlier intervention in suspected ghost broking schemes.
Find out more about how we help insurance sector clients here.
