Claims farming – the scandal continues

There is a massive, illegal and outsourced market in selling British mobile telephone numbers for the purpose of sending unsolicited text messages about personal injury claims and possibly other hard sell services. Much of this trade in data is now occurring via India, firstly because it is extremely cheap and secondly, also likely so that anyone accused of wrongdoing in this country may try to argue that they did not know that the data was wrongfully obtained.

Apparently, the data tends to be resold several times via brokers before it reaches accident companies and then lawyers. Each set of brokers marks up the data and by the time a potential claim reaches lawyers, the “referral” can end up costing up to £500.00 per claim. This in turn ultimately feeds through to higher costs in lawyers fees, often paid by insurers and higher insurance premiums for everyone.

The Sunday Telegraph recently investigated the outsourced trade. A company in India, RouteSMS,  advised it’s investigators that he could supply a thousand numbers for just £3,00 and that texts could be sent from India as part of the service.

Whilst controversy has recently surrounded the personal injury claims market there have also been many claims of leakage of customer details from call centres in India relating to bank information, utilities and such like.

Returning to the personal i jury market, the Sunday Telegraph claims that the Accident Advice Helpline may be raking in £12 million a year principally from selling data.

Part of the problem for lawyers in all of the above is that personal injury lawyers are often seen as the ultimate bad guys in all of this. Whilst not blameless perhaps, the industry in data trade is a widespread problem and not confined in any way to lawyers, most of whom are also constrained by both budget and ethics in trying to compete properly for work via traditional marketing.

Accidents during driving tests

Freedom of Information requests are regularly producing fascinating and previously unknown facts and the below are no exception. Did you know that ….

• Over 300 learner drivers and examiners suffered an injury whilst on driving tests in Britain last year.
• 147 injuries were recorded requiring hospital treatment and 192 were categorised as minor
• The injuries included at least 5 physical attacks on driving test examiners and over 200 instances of severe verbal abuse
• During driving tests, more than 1,000,000 instances were recorded of dangerous driving or serious fail faults.
• The most common issues observed of bad driving during tests include practice at junctions and failure to use mirrors properly
• Of over 1.5 million driving tests last year, there was a pass rate of just over 46%.

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