Ghost broking: how fake car insurance sold on social media catches young drivers

According to Independent Digital News and Media, Aviva is pushing for faster action against ghost broking, a scam that sells young drivers fake or invalid car insurance, often through social media.

The scam works by making a policy look artificially cheap. Criminals alter details on a genuine-looking policy document, then sell it as if it were real. The price looks good because it is not a real price for real cover. A young driver, often paying high premiums already and often less familiar with how insurance should look, takes the deal.

The tell comes too late

Nothing about the sale reveals the fraud. The document looks like a policy. The price looks like a discount. The problem only surfaces when the driver needs the policy to work: after a crash, or a claim. At that point there is no valid cover behind the paperwork, and the driver finds out at the worst possible moment, not the point of purchase.

That timing is the mechanism the scam depends on. A fake policy only has to survive until the sale is made. It never has to survive a claim, because by the time a claim happens, the money has already changed hands and the seller is gone. The scam is built to be checked by nobody until it is too late for the check to help.

Aviva has watched this scale. Comparing the full year of 2025 with the year to date in 2026, the number of website takedown requests it has made related to ghost broking has increased by more than eight times. That is a measure of how much fraudulent content is appearing online for the insurer to find and flag, not a measure of how many people have been sold fake cover, but it tracks the same growth.

Aviva's Owen Morris, CEO personal lines, points to two changes: Ofcom following through on proposals to get fraudulent content identified and removed before it causes harm, and a new coalition of financial institutions, platforms, consumer groups, regulators and law enforcement sharing real-time intelligence. Aviva also wants mandatory verification of financial services advertisers, so that an advertiser's account activity has to match genuine Financial Conduct Authority authorisation to sell, arrange, introduce or promote the product.

None of that changes what a buyer sees in the moment of sale. A cheap policy and a document that looks right are not proof of cover. The only way to know a policy is genuine is to check it against the insurer directly, not against how convincing the paperwork looks, because convincing paperwork is exactly what this scam sells.