Inland Marine Fraud

[threed]

Our agency recently wrote an Inland Marine policy for a business that needed coverage for about $230K worth of equipment financed by a large finance company. 10 days after inception a man comes to the office with the policy in hand and says that he never requested this policy. It ends up that someone else posed as him, resurrected his corporation that he had sold over 4 years ago, to fraudulently finance the equipment. A little more digging revealed that the same individual resurrected another corporation that posed as the equipment dealer to arrange the financing. There wasn't even any equipment that changed hands. It was just a bunch of paper that caused the finance company to check all the boxes and rubber stamp the loan. The finance company's fraud department has been alerted and is looking in to it.

Writing the IM policy enabled the scammer to get one step closer to the end. Our agency is implementing controls to keep this from happening again and my question is what agencies do to "sniff" out fraud. Any other stories or examples of fraud would also help the rest of us to be more aware of common scams.

[HarrisburgAgent]

Wow, that is crazy.

I usually do some checking online before I talk to a prospect, or after I get a lead. I will check the department of state to see if the company name is filed (it is amazing how many times people don't know the full legal name of their business), check labor and industry website to see if they currently have workers compensation. I check to see if they have a webpage, if they do, I typically assume their email address will end with the @websitename.com, not always the case, but if a legitimate business has an employee using a @aol or @hotmail, my guard is up as to why... I also typically google the phone number I have on record to see if there is any other info I can gain.