UK insurers warn romance scams recruit victims into staged crash claims

A new variant of romance fraud is turning dating-app victims into the front end of insurance fraud—less “send me money” and more “lend me your identity”.

The UK’s Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB) is warning that scammers are manipulating people they meet online into staging car crashes, acting as “witnesses”, or taking out policies and filing bogus claims. The Guardian reports that insurers believe the scale is under-reported, in part because victims feel shame and in part because the immediate cash loss is not always borne by the victim. The aim is to obtain payouts from insurers while keeping the fraudster’s own identity out of the claim file.

The mechanism is simple: the scammer selects targets not for wealth but for compliance. The victim is coached—sometimes given a script—to tell an insurer they were a passenger, a witness, or injured. In one case cited by the Guardian, a man was sentenced at Bournemouth crown court after persuading women he met on dating sites to participate in planned crashes at specific locations and then submit personal-injury claims.

From an incentives standpoint, this is a neat adaptation to a tightening fraud environment. As insurers improve anomaly detection and link analysis, fraudsters shift to “clean” identities with no prior flags. The victim becomes a disposable interface: a low-cost, low-suspicion claimant who can pass basic KYC checks, sign forms and answer calls.

The externality is pushed onto everyone else. When fraudulent claims rise, insurers respond in the only ways available inside a regulated product: higher premiums, more exclusions, more documentation, more friction at the point of claim. Honest customers absorb the cost through price and hassle, while the fraudster captures upside and offloads downside risk—legal exposure and future insurability—onto the manipulated claimant.

The IFB notes that victims risk being placed on an insurance fraud register, which can make obtaining future cover difficult and can affect credit. That is the hidden price of “just helping”: the victim is not merely deceived; they are induced to commit a prosecutable act, often without appreciating that insurers share data and that a flagged identity can become financially radioactive.

This also exposes a structural weakness of state-adjacent enforcement. Insurance fraud is policed through a patchwork of private investigation, data-sharing and selective prosecution. The system works best when the claimant bears clear personal cost. But romance scams exploit emotional leverage to override normal risk calculations, effectively subsidising fraud with human psychology.

The practical advice from the IFB is predictable—report suspicious profiles, keep evidence, refuse any request involving dishonesty, and if someone claims an urgent emergency, offer to contact emergency services. The deeper lesson is less comforting: as verification and compliance harden, fraud does not disappear. It migrates to the softest point in the chain—people who can be socially engineered into signing their name.

In a market economy, trust is a scarce asset. Romance fraud has found a way to turn it into an insurance claim.