Proper Claims Mgt Critical To Deepening Insurance Acceptance, Says Experts
A database containing up-todate mobile phone numbers of 487 million Whatsapp users, including 19 million from Nigeria, was leaked and put up for sale, with the dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries, a report by Cybernews has revealed.
The report showed that, the threat actor posted an ad on a well-known hacking community forum, claiming, they were selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile from 84 countries.
The threat actor also claimed that there are over 44 million records of Whatsapp users from Egypt included; 36million users from Italy; 32 users from USA; 28.8 million Whatsapp users from Saudi-Arabia; 19.8 million from France and 19.6 million Whatsapp users from Turkey.
The dataset for sale also allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers, among others.
In Africa, the actor claimed that, he/she has the record of about 11.5 million Whatsapp users from Algeria, the record of nine million Whatsapp users from Nigeria and about one million Whatsapp users from Ghana.
The threat actor told Cybernews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK for $2,500, and Germany for $2,000.
Upon request, the seller of WhatsApp’s database shared a sample of data with Cybernews researchers. There were 1097 UK and 817 US user numbers in the shared sample.
Cybernews investigated all the numbers included in the sample and managed to confirm that all of them are, in fact, WhatsApp users.
The seller did not specify how they obtained the database, suggesting they “used their strategy” to collect the data, and assured Cybernews all the numbers in the instance belong to active WhatsApp users.
Head of Cybernews research team, Mantas Sasnauskas said: “in this age, we all leave a sizeable digital footprint and tech giants like Meta should take all precautions and means to safeguard that data.
“We should ask whether an added clause of ‘scraping or platform abuse is not permitted in the Terms and Conditions’ is enough.”
Proper Claims management is critical to deepening insurance penetration and acceptance in the country, according to experts.
The experts, who spoke at the at Carefirst Consult 2022 Claims Advocacy Conference with the theme ‘Catalysing Insurance Through Better Claims Experience held in Lagos, lamented about the poor insurance penetration, urging insurers to always honour genuine claims as this will trigger trust from the general public.
On his part, the principal consultant, Carefirst, Mr. Gus Wiggle said, he was inspired to set up Carefirst Consult, said, any insurer that fails to settle genuine claims is setting a bad signal to prospective policyholders, which will also affect the entire insurance industry.
According to him,“we are seeing a trend which has become very challenging and that trend actually manifested itself during #EndSARS riot where insurance companies started reminding the insured that some of their policies will not cover their exposures.”
Stating that insurers ought to have informed and explained to policyholders the terms of their policy at the point of subscription, he urged underwriters to find every reason to pay claims rather than looking for excuses to evade claims payment.
Disclosing that Carefirst Consult was established to work for both insurer and the insured, he said, his company is set to improve the claims payment ability of the insurance industry.