Since ads for the site have begun showing up on Face book, more and more people have been wondering about the site. The issue is not perfectly cut-and-dry, since it depends on what you consider a scam. There is nothing technically illegal going on with insurance comparisons, but the site is not exactly squeaky-clean, either. On the basis of substantial evidence, with information from users of insurance comparisons as well as information provided by the site itself, the short answer is: Yes. Insurance comparisons are essentially a scam.
The reason that there have been so many questions about the trustworthiness of insurance comparisons website is that the site’s ads make amazing, outlandish claims about insurance costs. The ads will claim that if you visit insurance comparisons you can get $9 (or $10, or $13) car insurance, or that the site offers some secret of car insurance that your insurance company wouldn’t want you to know about. Furthermore, these ads take advantage of Face book’s data on your location, in order to make it appear as though the ad is for your area in particular, regardless of the fact that once you click the ad, the site you are taken to is always the same. So, to begin with, there are a few important things to consider. Is that $9 insurance offer fake, or if it is real, how does it work? Are the ads for insurance comparisons dishonest?
Here’s where we come to the not-technically-illegal part of what insurance comparisons does. If you go to the site, you won’t even find a reference to an online comparison or quote service. Instead, what you’ll find is a site that has been unchanged since sometime in early 2007, including all of its so-called news stories and financial updates. There is very little to look at. In fact, usually the only way to get to the “quote” form, with its promise of information on stupidly cheap insurance, is to follow a link from another website.
When it comes to the links to this phony quote form, you will find them primarily on other sites owned and operated by the same company that owns and operates insurance comparisons website. The biggest offender, especially when it comes to misleading Face book ads, is lifestylejournal.com, which is a bogus news site that exists to host links to insurance comparisons. Even that site is a drop in the bucket, since the owner of insurance comparisons website and lifestylejournal.com owns a huge number of websites. Consider this and the typical outcome of a request for a “quote,” and insurance comparisons looks downright shady. If you do go and fill out the form on insurance comparisons website, with the expectation of getting a quote for that car insurance that costs less than twenty dollars, a few things will happen.
First, if you look carefully, you will find that the number given in the ad or fake news story, whatever it was (usually between $8 and $13) is a weekly rate. In other words, the cost for the insurance over a normal six-month or one-year period is just as much as car insurance would normally cost in your area. So that low number is not, strictly speaking, a lie; however, it is misleading.
Once you have submitted the quote request form, you will be given links to websites for a bunch of different insurance companies, but this information is not tailored to you, and it is not any different from what you would get in a simple web search. Then, the phone calls will start. Some people report getting phone calls as soon as five minutes after filling out the quote form. The person on the other end will ask for a bunch of information in order to give you an insurance quote, although they may never sell you insurance, and they may call you back the next day asking all the same questions. Some users of insurance comparisons have reported that these phone calls may be as frequent as one every half-hour, and other users have reported being woken up by these calls at two or three in the morning. Users have also reported that once they have created an account with insurance comparisons, they cannot close the account in order to remove their personal information.
What is really going on with insurance.comparisons.org is that it is an information harvesting scam. The site collects your information and sells it, and that is how the site makes money. If you read the privacy statement provided at the bottom of the quote form page, it specifically states that your information will be given to third parties.
“We may enter into alliances, partnerships, or other business arrangements with third parties who may be given access to personal information including your name, address, telephone number, and email for the purpose of providing you information regarding products and services that we think will be of interest to you. In connection with alliances, partnerships, or arrangements, we may also provide certain information to third parties if we have determined that the information will be used in a responsible manner by a responsible third party. For example, some of our partners operate stores or provide services on our site, while others power offerings developed by us for your use.”
Perhaps you wonder who this “we” refers to. According to the publicly-available registration data for insurance.comparisons.org, the site is registered to Media Force Ltd, a company in Israel. Media Force Ltd does not provide any information about itself, even on its own website, except for office contact information. The individual name and address in the registration information for insurance comparisons is Alexandra Moshe, 54 Jabotinski Street, Holon, Israel. However, elsewhere on the Internet, the name Eyal Hay Moshe is associated with Media Force Ltd., at the same address. It appears to be the case that Media Force Ltd. may operate as many as five hundred and fifty other sites.
These other sites are not related to insurance comparisons, or even to insurance. Instead, they run the gamut from British sports betting sites, to sites that supposedly help you keep your computer’s drivers up-to-date, to fake news sites designed to drive traffic elsewhere. Furthermore, some of these sites, including those that link to insurance comparisons website, are known to use fake customer testimonials along with stock photos.
One can reasonably conclude that insurance comparisons are dishonest. The site does not have any special information to offer you about car insurance. But it is very important to remember that the law often allows for your information to be used or sold if you give it willingly. If you fill out that quote form, it may be legal for your information to be sold, even if you are on the Do Not Call Registry. Of course, once that information is sold, there is no guarantee that it hasn’t been sold to someone crooked. Therefore, although insurance comparisons may not be breaking the law — that is unclear — the site may be selling your information to a company or organization that means to use your information to scam you. Because an insurance comparison takes your information for reasons other than what it tells you, it is fair to call the site a scam.
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