The Auto Insurance Lead Crisis Part 2

Last week, we talked about a growing issue within the auto insurance lead generation market. The crisis as we describe is the influx of fraudulent leads into the system, but not just a small number. These fraudulent leads are like a denial of service attack on those who sell leads to agents directly. A group of initially well-intentioned middle men began sending along already passed over leads, tweaking them slightly and frequently trying to trick the filters of those aggregators who have agent bases. Like many attacks, this happens in real time, and the systems of the aggregators are for the most part dumb. They will look at anything sent their way, reject those that don’t match the criteria, accept those that look right. Complex systems but dumb as to their ability to pick up on certainly unnatural changes, e.g., a huge spike in leads being reviewed, the similarity between leads reviewed, rejected, and accepted. These aren’t neural net machines, and so there will be a natural limitation in their ability to make predictive decisions.

We left off with a simple question. What will happen now that more and more companies are realizing so many of the leads they bought were fraud. The simple answer would be to find a way to turn off those sources, to do a better job of uncovering which leads coming in are fraud, and as a result cleaning up the system. By all intents and purposes, that is exactly what should happen. But, that isn’t what is really happening.