There’s been a growing trend of fraud in the finance industry, where several life and funeral policy providers have defrauded their customers and left their covers in poor condition.
I was having a conversation with my mom this morning and she was telling me about a strange SMS she received from her life cover provider, which stated that her policy had lapsed. She is not the first person to whom this happened in my family. Just a couple of weeks ago, my grandmother had received a similar SMS from her own service provider. Fortunately for my mom and grandmother, they had proof of their good payment history, so the “error” was swiftly corrected.
My mom then told me that while she was at the branch to fix this “error”, another lady left in tatters because she, too, had received the same SMS. She, unfortunately, didn’t know how to deal with it but gave my mom the peculiar explanation she had received from the teller who helped her. The teller told her that sales consultants are always chasing targets, so what they do is close someone’s existing policy and reopen it, to drive their sales up. Now, this is a form of fraud because payout on policies is accumulated by the months a person has had the policy open.
This reminded me of a similar situation with one of the big banks in South Africa, only this wasn’t as detrimental as the life policy situation. When my friend started out as a teller, she also had sales and activations targets. One of her targets included banking app activations, which could only be done at a branch. For the first three months, about four of my friends and I would uninstall our apps, redownload them then go to the branch so she would activate them, therefore driving her activations target up.
The life policy situation reminded me of the importance of keeping a paper trail for everything. If you pay your policies by hand, have a pocketbook in which you staple all your receipts for safekeeping. The safest way, however, is to activate a debit order for said policy.
Abenathi Gqomo
