A mystery shrouded in an enigma, wrapped in riddle, that riddle in turn occluded by an almost impenetrable veil some kind of misty stuff that’s basically impossible to see through, that’s how the origin of the term ‘ghost broker’ has been described (right here, right now, in the very first sentence of this story).
It’s as much of mystery, in its own way, as the term ‘mystery shopper’. For there is, let’s face it, very little that is mysterious about a mystery shopper. If a mystery shopper were mysterious, they wouldn’t be doing their job right. So it is with ghost brokers. Not only are they not technically ghosts, most of them aren’t even dead.
What so-called ghost brokers actually do is con people into buying insurance policies involving no actual insurance. Slip us a couple of ponies and you can have some motor insurance, they will typically say. Their unsuspecting victims duly comply and receive in return nothing more substantial than an empty promise, an insignificant slip of paper, or a valueless text or email or something.
Or, at least, that’s what Bankstone News used to think ghost brokers did until just now, when we learned that Ghost Broker Daniel Toma Barbu of London E13 (presumably not a designation that appears on his business card) has been busted by crack anti-insurance-fraud squad the FEDs.
Rather than selling non-existent insurance policies, what old Danny TB was up to was ‘setting up car insurance policies using addresses that were not linked to the policyholders’. This allowed him to secure more competitive premiums for his clientele (or to pocket the difference) by making it look as if they lived in a bucolic out of town location, rather than in the urban hellhole that is Plaistow/Newham.
Where did it all go wrong for Toma Barbu? Perhaps is was a mistake in hindsight to register more than twenty of his customers’ vehicles at the same rural address. Who can say? But for now at least, the FEDs have put a stop to Mr TB’s ghostly antics.
Good thing too we say here at Bankstone News.
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