Chubb To Offer UK 'Troll Insurance' Policy (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Insurance group Chubb will start offering the UK's first cyber-bullying policy – 'troll insurance' – through which it will accept claims of up to £50,000 to cover counselling and relocation costs, as well as time spent out of work. Chubb will provide its personal insurance policy customers the option to claim expenses ensued from online abuse. Cyberbullying is defined by the insurer as 'three or more acts by the same person or group to harass, threaten or intimidate a customer.' While the new insurance option is targeted towards parents concerned about their children's online activities, adults who are targeted by cyber abuse will also be able to make a claim.

Comments

Someone doesn't understand the internet

[Dunbal]

I hope Chubb thought this out carefully because they will need to self insure...

Re:Someone doesn't understand the internet

[lgw]

I hope Chubb thought this out carefully because they will need to self insure...

Oh, there will be fraud at first. but IMO this will end quite well. Many claims of "harassment so bad I had to flee my home" are bogus, often coupled with GoFundMes that bring in considerable funds for the person putting on the show. If done carefully, none of that is obviously illegal, being a very roundabout sort of fraud.

But it's different when you file a police report (and at least one professional victim found out the hard way that filing fake police reports is a crime), and insurance companies depend on police reports as their primary anti-fraud mechanism. I look forward to the professional victims who try this fraud, and discover that adding "insurance fraud" to "filing a fake police report" was a serious mistake.

Hopefully this will end with a lot less fraud among people claiming real harassment.

Re:Someone doesn't understand the internet

[TheRaven64]

Is this reallysuch a widespread, common problem that people need insurance for it

I think that you misunderstand insurance. The things that you want to offer insurance for are ones where the perceived risk is significantly higher than the actual risk. This lets you charge a hefty premium, with little risk of having to pay out.

Re:Someone doesn't understand the internet

[thoromyr]

From your description it doesn't sound like they'll have any problem at all. There is a strong perception of risk so unless they rig the rules so they never pay out under any realistically possible conditions they should be fine.

GP was right: insurance thrives where the actual risks/costs are significantly lower than the real risks/costs. There are some factors that can influence this (such as regulatory requirements to carry insurance and situations with undue burden), but the underlying mechanism (real costs lower than billed costs) is required -- otherwise the insurance company would go out of business -- and profitability is highest when real costs are significantly lower than actual costs.

Regulatory: there's a reason car insurance companies pay for legislation mandating car insurance, and it isn't out of a desire for safer roads.

Undue Burden: this is the usual excuse offered for insurance and it certainly is a factor, but it is not as fundamental as the real/billed cost differential. Essentially, when the potential cost of a risk exceeds an individual's ability to pay in order to survive the eventuality insurance is paid to cover it. In principle there's a balance between rate of incidence, average cost and billed costs.

Re:Fraud?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it won't you FUCKING GODDAMN FAGGOT.

(you're welcome)

Re:Unfortunate name

[gstoddart]

So if you follow them after they move are you a Chubbie Chaser? ;-)

Re:Can't wait for this in Australia

[Nidi62]

Because I can't get enough of the insurance ads on commercial TV for insurance of anything they can think of.

Since pretty much everything in Australia is either designed to or actively trying to kill you, do they offer insurance for just being in Australia?

Re:Can't wait for this in Australia

[PopeRatzo]

Since pretty much everything in Australia is either designed to or actively trying to kill you, do they offer insurance for just being in Australia?

They need to offer death adder insurance, that's for sure. Those bastards got "death" right in their name.

I have a competing service

[slashmydots]

For the low, low price of $1 US I will offer get the fuck over it insurance. If you're the victim of cyber bullying and harassment I will send you messages reminding you that it's just some dumbass social reject autistic piece of human garbage whose opinions and statements should have no weight against your self confidence. I'll also remind you that they do not represent society as a whole and you should honestly just disregard all the stupid bullshit they're saying.

Re:I have a competing service

[thoromyr]

I can see why you are posting anonymously...

Interesting, does it also...

[DRMShill]

offer protection against lunatic SJW mobs that will try to ruin your life if you ever use incorrect speech?

Re:Just another scam

[Proteus]

Insurance is a way to externalize risk by diluting it among a population -- I can take a known loss instead of accepting the entire risk of something bad happening. By definition, most people have to actually realize less risk than the individual insurance rate covers, but you gain huge advantages to having certainty of what your risk is.

Take fire insurance, for example. I insure a building that would cost $200k to rebuild, and it costs me $50/month. Given the chance of a fire actually occurring and causing enough damage to require a rebuild, my loss expectancy over the next 10 years is greater than what I pay in insurance. It seems scammy because there's a chance my loss over 10 years to fire will be $0, in which case I'm "out" $6k with no value returned, right?

But here's the thing -- I know exactly what it's going to cost me for insurance this year, and I can plan around that. I don't need to keep huge piles of cash on hand to rebuild that $200k structure. That means I can spend that money on growing my business, etc.; the value of being able to know what I'm on the hook for means I can keep a smaller amount of cash on hand, and that's absolutely value returned.

Insurance only becomes a bad deal if you entirely trust the insurance company to represent the risk fairly to you, or if you don't bother to assess whether a particular risk makes sense to externalize.

Re:Just another scam

[kheldan]

So you want more and bigger government? Also, you want it to take months or even years for your claim to be processed, while it goes through government bureaucracy? You think private sector insurance companies are bad, just wait until the government is handling it.