Ghost broking
Ghost broking explained: what the fraud is and how it is recognised
Ghost broking is the fraudulent sale of motor insurance by someone posing as a legitimate broker or intermediary, where the victim pays for cover that is either wholly fake or genuine but obtained on falsified details, and normally finds out only when they are stopped by police or a claim is declined.
For insurers
See the damage before you send anyone
Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, sends the policyholder a link. They film the damage on their own phone, guided step by step, and the evidence lands with the claim.
It sits at policy inception rather than at claim, which is what makes it different from most of a counter-fraud team's caseload. By the time the file reaches claims, the fraud is months old and the person in front of you is usually the victim rather than the offender.
How does ghost broking work?
Three broad patterns show up in casework, and they call for different responses.
- Falsified genuine policy: the ghost broker buys real cover from an insurer using altered details, typically a different age, address, occupation or main driver, then charges the victim the difference. The policy exists but is voidable, so the victim is effectively uninsured the moment it is examined.
- Forged documentation: no policy is bought at all. The victim receives certificate and schedule documents that were manufactured, and the insurer named on them has no record of anything.
- Buy and cancel: a genuine policy is taken out and then cancelled shortly afterwards, with the refund kept and the victim left holding documents for cover that has lapsed.
Aviva has flagged a fourth variant: convincing fake websites that impersonate real insurers, take payment directly, and issue counterfeit documents without any legitimate insurer being involved at all. Aviva noted in November 2025 that this pattern is particularly hard to detect proactively, because the insurer has no transaction to see and learns of the fraud only when a victim reports a problem.
How big is the problem?
Aviva reported in November 2025 that ghost broking cases it detected were up more than 4% year on year and 22% over two years, with victims losing around £2,000 on average, made up of roughly £1,700 in premium and £300 in fees. In one case Aviva identified a suspected ghost broker who had taken around £150,000 selling worthless policies.
The Insurance Fraud Bureau has recorded a 52% rise in ghost broking activity between 2022 and 2024. On the application side more broadly, the Association of British Insurers reported that insurers prevented an estimated 684,800 fraudulent insurance applications in 2024, 7.4% more than in 2023.
Who gets targeted
Young drivers, overwhelmingly. An Aviva survey of 2,000 drivers aged 17 to 25, published in November 2025, found that nearly one in three had bought car insurance through a social media platform, and that 84% of those who bought a fake policy that way ran into serious problems. Among them, 24% found their policy had been set up with incorrect details such as age or address, 24% had a claim declined, 19% found the seller had disappeared, and 16% were stopped by police.
Recent migrant communities and drivers with non-standard risk profiles are also disproportionately affected, for the same underlying reason: a legitimate quote is expensive or hard to obtain, so an offer that undercuts the market looks like relief rather than a warning.
Ghost broking indicators counter-fraud teams look for
- Inception patterns: clusters of policies sharing a contact email, phone number, bank detail or IP address across unrelated proposers.
- Detail mismatches: proposer age, address or occupation that do not fit the vehicle, the postcode or the way the policy was paid for.
- Payment routing: premium paid to a personal account rather than a regulated intermediary's client account.
- Short-lived policies: inception followed quickly by cancellation and a refund to an account that is not the policyholder's.
- Document anomalies: certificates that do not match the insurer's current template, formatting, reference structure or wording.
- Discovery route: the customer's first contact is a police stop, an ANPR notice or a declined claim rather than a normal service query.
- Regulatory check: the seller cannot be found on the Financial Conduct Authority register under the name they trade as.
Each of these is a reason to look, never a finding on its own. Innocent explanations are common, and treating a flag as a verdict produces wrongful declines and complaints that go on to succeed.
Ghost broking example: how a case surfaces
A 19-year-old is stopped and told the vehicle is showing as uninsured. He produces a certificate that names a real insurer, bought through an account he found on social media, at around half the price of every other quote he had received.
The insurer has no record of the policy number. The certificate is a good forgery of an old template, and the same seller account turns out to be linked to eleven other certificates in the same format. That last point, the linkage, is what turns one victim's complaint into an investigation worth referring. Referral practice is covered in SIU.
What ghost broking is confused with
It is not fronting, though it often produces it. Fronting is a policyholder naming an older, lower-risk main driver dishonestly, and the policyholder knows what they are doing. In ghost broking the same misrepresentation is made by a third party who is charging for the privilege, and the person named on the policy is generally unaware.
It is also distinct from general application fraud, where a proposer misrepresents their own risk. The distinguishing feature of ghost broking is the intermediary: someone is selling the misrepresentation as a service, at volume, to people who believe they are buying insurance. That volume is why the document trail matters, and why the same forgery techniques now show up in claims evidence too, as covered in AI-generated insurance fraud.
