Two insurance direct sales agency heads arrested
The heads of two insurance sales agencies from Delhi have been arrested for duping hundreds of existing policy holders by talking them into investing in other plans, promising “hefty” returns before going incommunicado. The arrest was in response to an FIR by Birla Sun Life with the NM Joshi Marg police in January when the firm itself unearthed the scam after receiving hundreds of complaints from clients. Data theft is also claimed because many complainants are direct BSL clients, the contact information on whom is available only with the company.
According to police sources, other leading private insurance companies are facing this menace all over the country with other such insurance Direct Sales Agencies (DSAs) involved in the malpractice. In its case with the police, BSL said it was flooded with complaints from customers over the last year where the majority of them claimed they were convinced into cancelling their existing BSL policy against other ‘lucrative’ schemes by the accused. “In one modus operandi, the accused badmouthed BSL, saying it had given them the short end of the deal by either claiming to be calling from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) or themselves. Since they had all the information and particulars of the victim’s policy details, clients instantly saw them as genuine and cancelled the current policy before depositing money into a stipulated bank account after which the conmen broke contact. In some cases, after cancelling the current policy they also sold them genuine policies of other insurance companies against which they (the accused) received a hefty commission. Sometimes they just claimed to be giving interest-free loans and heavy investment returns and took the money as the initial investment amount,” said an officer.
Following the complaints, BSL hired private insurance claims investigator Guru Systems, who after studying complaints and analysing numbers from which the clients received the calls, zeroed in on two DSAs, TDS Value Card and Arcade Insurance Pvt. Ltd. based in Delhi. On February 15, a team led by PI Shubhada Chavan from the NM Joshi police arrested Kapil Kumar (27) of Arcade Insurance from east Delhi and Sonu Sharma (24) of TDS from Ashok Nagar. Both were remanded to interrogative custody till Thursday. During a search at the TDS office, cops found data on 4.5 lakh existing policyholders even from other companies like Aegon Religare, HDFC and Reliance, along with BSL.
Revealing from where he got the data, Sharma led the police to a Vashi firm, Space Tech, which has thrown up links to another company. BSL, however, refused to comment.
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