You Won’t Believe These Simple Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Car Insurance Claim

A car as a personal mode of transportation can be invaluable in so many ways, but as much as it can take you to work and comes in handy in times of emergencies, the upkeep and maintenance expenditures can sometimes be a pain.

For starters, you need to have the cash to pay upfront in order to own a vehicle, but keeping up with insurance bills and taxes every couple of months can prove to be a real headache for someone who goes from paycheck to paycheck every single month.

Having vehicle insurance can save you a ton of money and legal hassle if you’re ever in an accident, but if you are a really careful driver who rarely gets into trouble, it seems like an unnecessary expenditure and might argue against the point of being a responsible motorist in the first place.

Sometimes, parents lie about their child as an occasional driver of the vehicle

But no matter how great of a driver you are who follows all the traffic laws and drives like a priest, there will always be that hot-headed teenager busy scrolling on twitter on his phone and looming forever closer in your rearview mirror threatening to rear-end or T-bone you at the next traffic light.

In short, unfortunate incidences are out of your control and therefore inevitable, but there’s always insurance, right? Not so fast. As many as 4,000 people a week find themselves in trouble when it comes to insurance claims after having made simple everyday motoring errors.

Some of these errors are just honest mistakes, but that doesn’t mean the offenders aren’t prosecuted. Besides that, there are many drivers who try to deceive the system just to get lower premiums, but this dishonesty won’t go unnoticed especially during insurance claims. Since 2014, the ABI has had 212,000 cases of fraudulent applications. Here are three ways people try to trick the system:

Fronting

Fronting is the most common offense when it comes to insurance registration or claims. This means that you put another person’s name as the driver of the vehicle, which is illegal.

This is usually done by young ones who use their parents on the policy for a cheaper premium. Surely this will slash off a portion of your bill but this is no doubt, a form of fraud.

Needless to say, the one who usually uses the vehicle must be named the main driver while occasional users as additional drivers. If violated, your insurance will be canceled and you might end up explaining yourself before a judge.

Using a different address to save money can invalidate your car insurance

Address

You also need to be honest of your residential address. This is also true when you move to another house or country or city because this is a factor insurers consider in your policy.

There’s a high chance that you will be rejected of your claim if you register your parents’ house in the suburbs when in fact you live at the heart of the city where there is a lot of traffic and a higher chance of accidents.

While insurance companies do have special investigation units to make sure all the details are correct, some people still try and provide inaccurate information to beat the system.

Previous Incidence

You need to tell any damage to the insurer no matter how small it may seem

This one might be considered as an honest mistake, compared to the other offenses on this list. Minor accidents like side mirror damage, may not sound like a big deal and therefore doesn’t need to be reported to your insurer but no – even the tiniest things need to be disclosed to your insurance provider.

Not doing so means you are in breach of your contract with the company and according to the law, it counts as falsifying documents and information.