Private insurers turn heat on spurious callers!

Reliance Life Insurance Company (RLIC), which along with six other private insurers had filed a complaint with the EOW against spurious callers, on Tuesday said seven persons were arrested and 12 detained by police in this connection in last few months.

"We are happy that our initiative to fight against spurious calling by fraudulent agents has made some headway with arrests and detentions. We are coordinating with the police in different regions to go hard against such offenders who make spurious calls to customers with a view to dupe them," RLIC, part of Reliance Capital, CEO Anup Rau said in a release.

The arrests and detentions in spurious calling cases have been made by police in various parts of the country including Ma- harashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, the release said.

Earlier, six private insurers - Reliance Life Insurance, ICICI Pru, HDFC Life, Birla Sun Life, SBI Life and Aegon Religare - had formally filed a complaint with the Economic Offences Wing (EOW), seeking its help to act against the spurious callers.

According to industry experts, the life in- surers are losing business potential worth Rs 100 crore annually due to these fraud callings.

Spurious calling is a term used by the insurance industry to refer to a group of fraudsters who call customers posing as representatives or employees of an insurance company and lure customers into fraudulently buying insurance products by making false and bo- gus offers.

RLIC has already filed over 200 complaints at various police stations against fraud call centres and spurious callers offering lucrative loans or gains with the policy.

"We have been receiving several queries from customers

getting spurious sales calls with unrealistic offers, including interest-free loans and extraordinary bonuses," Rau added.

RLIC is one of the leading private sector life insurance companies with business premium, including renewal premium, of over Rs 4,015 crore for the year ended March 31, 2013. The company has sold over 7.5 lakh policies during the above financial year and has an asset under management of more than Rs 18,189 crore (as on March 31).

It has a distribution network of 1,000 offices and over 1,00,000 advisors.