People searching for health insurance on the internet need to be cautious about giving their personal information to rogue health insurance websites. These rogue websites promise to give instant quotes, but capture your personal information and then sell it to agents. Results from 2 Google searches for “Pregnancy Health Insurance” and Maternity Insurance Plans,” showed that about 50% of the top 20 results were rogue websites. There are many legitimate health insurance websites that will protect your information, so you need to be able to tell the difference between good and bad websites. Clicking the “Get Quote” button at rogue websites, basically tells them to “Please have up to 8 health insurance agents call me for the next 8 weeks to sell me a policy,” and “Please sell my email address to health insurance agents and email list services so I can receive their emails.” I’ll show you how to spot these rogue websites before they get your information.
Ten years ago I left the corporate world to start a business of my own. I knew I need to get health insurance for my family so I searched online for San Diego Medical Insurance. I clicked one of the top links and read some information of the website and saw that I could get instant San Diego health insurance quotes by filling out their quote request form, so I did. When I hit the “Submit” button to get the quotes, I was taken to a generic page that said I would be contacted by 5-8 agents that would provide my instant quotes. Twenty seconds later my phone started ringing, and for over 2 months I got daily phone calls from agents trying to sell me health insurance. The junk emails were actually worse because they never stopped and seemed to multiply as time went by. I eventually had to get a new email address (this was before spam filters).
Since then I’ve learned the telltale signs of fake quote websites and how to recognize them quickly. Here is the list of red flags to watch for:
1. The website has Google Ads for insurance – No legitimate California health insurance broker would allow ads for competitive websites to be displayed. 2. The website contains a link for “Agents” or “Brokers” – This typically means the site is going to sell your information to the agents/brokers that sign up to use the website’s service. Scan through ALL the links, top, bottom, and sides of the pages. 3. Quickly scan the privacy policy, especially the first few paragraphs, to see if they are going to provide your information to third parties – If so, they plan to sell your information to agents or email list services. 4. In California, check to see that the website displays an insurance license number (many times this is placed at the bottom of the page) – If not it could be a rogue website or a national company that might not know the specific details of the California health insurance market. 5. Look for something similar to the following wording “this website provides a free service and is not an insurer or agent/broker” – this means it is a marketing website that will sell your information to agents or refer you to a national broker for a referral commission.
If you don’t see any of the above red flags, and you entered your zip code and pushed the button to get a San Diego Medical Insurance quote, you still need to look out for 3 more red flags on the quote request form:
6. Look for a Disclaimer below the quote request form to see if the website is going to have agents call you. 7. The quote request form should not require your home address – this isn’t necessary to provide a quote, but will result in you getting junk mail. 8. The quote request form asks for the best time to contact you – this means agent will definitely be calling you.
If you find any of the above red flags you should close the page; your information won’t be saved as long as you don’t hit the final “Submit” button on the quote request form page.
Using longer keyword searches, you’ll find that rogue San Diego health insurance websites are pretty common in Google searches. To make sure you don’t give your personal information to one of these rogue websites, you need to be on the lookout for the key signs listed above. The red flags to watch for are Agent/Broker links, Google Insurance Ads, bad privacy policies, no insurance license listed, the quote request disclaimer, and text that says the website is not an insurer or a broker. Using these precautions will allow you to get the insurance information and quotes you need from legitimate health insurance websites, and keep your personal information safe.
Tim T is an author writing about the insurance industry. For a great website on finding San Diego Medical Insurance visit SPF Insurance. While you’re there, get instant San Diego Medical Insurance quotes.