Paid traffic: a new scheme of fraud with a hard hat may lead to an increase in the price of policies

A new fraudulent scheme is gaining popularity in Russia: intruders buy used cars abroad, make cosmetic repairs and insure them with an inflated cost — 1.5–2.5 times more than the real one. Then they arrange an accident and demand a full insurance payment. T-Insurance informed Izvestia about the identification of a massive deception scenario. A number of market players also record a doubling in the number of such crimes this year. The further spread of the scheme may eventually lead to an increase in the price of policies, experts say. At the same time, the total damage from insurance fraud in 2025 has already reached 3.5 billion rubles. About how to deal with car insurance fraud, see the Izvestia article.

What schemes are used by insurance fraudsters?

In 10 months of 2025, the damage to the insurance market from fraudulent schemes reached about 3.5 billion rubles, Sergey Yefremov, vice president of the All-Russian Union of Insurers (VSS), told Izvestia. However, crimes that could not be identified are not taken into account here, which means that the figure may be even higher. At the same time, for the whole of last year, the figure amounted to 3.9 billion rubles.

According to T-Insurance, in 2025, malefactors often stage accidents for casco payments throughout Russia - that is, the problem is becoming widespread. In terms of fraud, Smolensk is the leader this year, where the ratio of fraudulent losses to all insured losses was 4.1%, said Mikhail Spivak, head of the Department for combating insurance fraud at T-Insurance. This year, the number of requests to the company for such staged accidents has approximately doubled compared to last year. Renaissance Insurance and Sovcombank Insurance also noted an increase in the number of such cases.

The scheme works as follows: attackers buy used German cars abroad at a symbolic cost, twist their mileage and carry out cosmetic repairs. Further, casco policies with an overestimated insurance amount of 1.5–2.5 times are issued for these cars in Russia. Then, criminals with the participation of restored cars fake an accident (collision with a tree, pole) and request full compensation from insurance companies.

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People sell cars at low prices, give money to scammers, and then try to cancel the contract.

At the same time, the payment not only pays off the fraudsters' costs, but also allows them to make a profit due to the greatly inflated insurance cost of the car. The average amount of compensation in such cases exceeds 5 million rubles, T-Insurance added.

As a rule, fraudsters use an agent sales channel for this scheme, since there are fewer opportunities to estimate the real value of a car. This allows criminals to overestimate the insurance amount by two or three times through the presentation of a purchase agreement, explained Viktor Alekseev, First Deputy General Director of IC MAKS.

The difficulty in identifying this scheme is due to the fact that automated calculators of insurance amounts are guided by the average annual mileage, which unscrupulous policyholders purposefully underestimate, which directly affects the cost of the policy and the potential payout, employees of the Department of expertise and loss settlement "Consent" reported.

However, if false data or facts are identified that confirm fraudulent intentions, the applicant is refused a policy, said Georgy Sotnikov, head of the Anti-fraud Department at Rosgosstrakh.

The scheme has gained particular popularity against the background of a sharp increase in the cost of foreign cars in 2022, which led to a significant expansion of the price fork at which insurance companies are willing to accept a car for insurance, said Abdulmalikov Amiran, director of the Corporate Security department at Renaissance Insurance.

However, over the past two years, the number of such attempts has begun to grow again, as fraudsters have discovered the nuances of the legislation of the countries through which used premium-class cars are imported from Europe in parallel, Sovcombank Insurance said.

Losses from this type of fraud remain at a high level, said Igor Ivanov, Vice President of Marketing, Advertising and PR at RESO-Garantia. He added: insurers face restrictions on access to significant information resources, and this plays into the hands of intruders.

Can a hard hat become more expensive due to the growth of fraudulent schemes

The level of casco fraud is still low, but fraudulent losses are becoming more expensive due to schemes with the "complete death" of cars and overestimation of amounts, Sovcombankinsurance shared. In 2025, for the first time in many years of observation, the damage in this segment caught up with the figure for CTP, despite the fact that there are significantly more cases of fraud under compulsory motor insurance.

Further active scaling of the described scheme may lead to an increase in the cost of casco policies by 5% in the entire market, estimated Mikhail Spivak from T-Insurance. KRYTEX founder Bulat Kilov agreed with this assessment. According to him, the last two years really look critical in terms of the spread of this scheme.

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When fraud becomes widespread, it affects the price of policies. Payments for such cases increase the overall loss of portfolios in the market, explained Nikolay Galushin, head of the National Insurance Information System (NSIS). This leads to lower margins for insurers, and then to a forced increase in tariffs for this type of insurance as a whole, because it is impossible to raise the price in advance only for fraudsters.

— The most significant price increase will affect the category of cars that are at risk, these are used foreign cars of the premium segment aged from five years. According to our estimates, if the current dynamics of the growth in the number of such frauds (doubling in a year) continues, then during 2026-2027, we can expect an increase in the cost of hard hats for this category of cars by 10-20%. Cheaper and mass—produced cars may face less significant growth (by several percent), as insurers will include risks in the overall tariff plan," predicts Irina Frank, CEO of Frank Auto.

According to Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma Committee on the financial market, it is important to act not separately, but within the framework of a single strategy. Identify new cases of fraud and jointly develop effective measures to combat it. Perhaps it is worth creating some kind of coordination center where regional law enforcement agencies will be able to join forces in the fight against insurance fraud, share experiences and adopt the methods of those regions that are already demonstrating successful results in exposing car fraudsters.

This problem can be overcome only through coordinated actions on three levels.: Nikita Kolesnikov, a representative of the Japanese export company HSS in the Russian Federation, believes that the insurance community, the state and the citizens themselves. In his opinion, the measures should be systematic. For example, it is important to tighten and standardize the procedure for independent examination of a car before concluding a contract and after the occurrence of an insured event. The pre-insurance inspection should include checking the vehicle's history abroad and diagnosing its actual technical condition.

According to Mikhail Spivak of T-Insurance, law enforcement agencies and courts need to respond more quickly to insurance fraud, which has long been a massive problem throughout Russia, and carefully study these court cases. In this case, the attackers will not receive profits from their "business", but direct losses in the case of comprehensive, complete and objective consideration of such losses in civil proceedings.

To effectively combat this, we need not only an active position of market participants, who must highlight information about the detection of new fraud schemes, but also that regional law enforcement agencies and civil courts pay special attention to cases related to insurance fraud and insurance companies also do not stay one—on-one with fraudsters, Anatoly Aksakov draws attention.

It is also worth analyzing mileage and previous repairs, said Igor Liukin, Deputy General Director of Absolut Insurance. According to him, cooperation with the Interior Ministry is also important: the exchange of data on suspicious cases and joint investigations.

One of the most effective tools is the use of new technologies in conjunction with data analysis, SOGAZ noted. Modern monitoring systems make it possible to detect suspicious activity and anomalies when analyzing a large array of submitted applications.

An important step in solving the problem of insurance fraud may be the formation of a register of criminals, according to the VSK. The creation of a single database would allow insurers to register proven cases of fraud and share information about unreliable individuals with other market participants.