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. In a recent Google search using the terms “Maternity Insurance Plans” and Pregnancy Health Insurance,” nearly 50% of the top 20 results were rogue websites. There are many legitimate San Diego medical 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 is essentially telling them to “Have 5-10 medical insurance agents call me to sell me a policy,” and “Please sell my email address to other list services and health insurance agents 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 decided to start my own business, so I left the corporate world. I needed to set up health insurance for my family so I went online and searched for San Diego Medical Insurance. I figured the top links should be the best ones to visit so I did. I read some information on the page and then decided to get an instant San Diego health insurance quote by filling out the request form. When I hit the “Get Quote” button I was sent to a page that told me I would be contacted by 5-8 agents that would provide me with 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 email was even worse because every agent and insurance company was sending emails, and they never stopped, so I eventually had to abandon that email address (this was before span filtering was any good).
As a result of that experience I learned the telltale signs of rogue websites and can now recognize them quickly. Here is the list of red flags to watch for:
- There are Google Ads for insurance on the website – legitimate California health insurance brokers would not allow ads for competitors to be displayed.
- You see links for “Agents” or “Brokers” on the website – the website is going to sell your contact info to the agents that sign up to use the website’s services. Scan through ALL the links, top, bottom, and sides of the pages.
- 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.
- The website has no insurance license number displayed (this is usually at the bottom of the page) – brokers that focus on the California market are required to display their license number. If there isn’t a license number it could be a rogue website or a national company that does not know the details of the California health insurance market.
- Look for the following text “this website provides a free service and is not an insurer or agent/broker,” or something similar near the top or bottom of the webpage – this identifies a marketing website that will sell your personal information to agents or refer you to national broker for a referral fee.
If you haven’t seen any red flags yet, so you entered your zip code and clicked the button to get a California Medical Insurance quote, you still have to watch out for 3 more red flags on the quote request form:
- Check the Disclaimer at the bottom of the quote request page to see if the website is going to have agents call you.
- 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.
- The quote request form asks for the best time to contact you – this means agent will definitely be calling you.
If one of the above 3 red flags occurs you should close that page; as long as you don’t hit the final “Submit” button on the request page, your information will not be saved.
Rogue San Diego health insurance websites are pretty common on the internet, and tend to show up in longer keyword searches. . To ensure you are working with a legitimate San Diego medical insurance website, you need to look for the key signs identified 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. Following these precautions will help you keep your personal information safe.
