The iPhone Insurance Scam
When we talk about an iPhone insurance scam there are several areas to talk about:
- The strange phone call from a call centre to your new iPhone, offering you cheaper iPhone insurance than your phone retailer.
- And the fraudsters who were gaming insurance providers to get a new iPhone whilst selling their old iPhone’s abroad for hundreds of pounds.
- Plus the stories of one or two iPhone retailers who seemed to be telling its customers they had to buy insurance or they would not be allowed a new iPhone unless they took out a new contract.
So let’s take a look at the strange phone call to your new iPhone number, offering you cheaper iPhone insurance. Where did they get your details from and how did they know you had recently got an iPhone? Well, there is no big sell off of your details here, just a smart business man with a clever idea. Quite simply, a call centre would get hold of a newly connected iPhone number, then ring 300 numbers each side of that number and would more than likely find 20% of the people who answer would be new iPhone owners. This trick apparently worked best pre 2009 when o2 were the only iPhone suppliers in the UK. As for them obtaining details, it would be the potential customer who would pass their own details on to well clued up call centre staff.
Now let’s take a look at another iPhone insurance scam, probably thought up by another clever business man, but this business man would be working outside of the law! Quite simply, you can pay for iPhone insurance cover by monthly payments. So someone would insure an iPhone and pay for a months cover, then claim to have lost it, played the excess fee and received a new iPhone. Then the ‘lost’ iPhone’s would be sold in bulk to countries in other parts of the world, where there is no IMEI data base connected with the UK, hence the iPhones would work fine and have a black market value of around £300.
One final iPhone insurance scam would be on the side of some poorly trained sales advisers working in High Street shops, who were incorrectly advising customers that they had to purchase iphone insurance at the time of taking out the new iPhone airtime agreement, as insurance would only be available for purchase at that point of time, this seemed to be an attempt to scare customers into taking out insurance before they had the chance to compare other options. In addition to this approach, customers were also advised that they would not be able to buy a replacement iPhone for cash if they did not have insurance, instead, they would have to take out a new iPhone airtime contract, whilst still paying for the old airtime agreement.
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