Types of Violations Investigated Include:

• Premium Theft – Identified by the Investigation Bureau staff as the single most prevalent type of misconduct seen in the insurer producer area. Instances can range from a single theft of minimal amounts to multi-million dollar scams perpetrated on the public and the insurance industry.
• Senior Citizen Abuse – Particular agents and insurers concentrate their marketing efforts on senior citizens. Certain agents and insurers abuse the senior citizen customer by over selling, misrepresentation and selling unneeded or even inappropriate insurance products to them. At times the misconduct is criminal, involving theft, false documents and confidence games. The current product lines most used in senior abuse are the single premium annuity and home care insurance.
• Insurance Company Insider Fraud – This is the insurance industry corollary to the nationally recognized problem of illegal and unethical conduct by corporate executives and managers. This program is designed to gather indicators of insider fraud and to channel them to the Investigation Bureau for investigation, as warranted. In general, the frauds involve victimizing the assets, collections and disbursements. 
• Viatical and Viatical Settlement Fraud – This involves complex schemes that induce unwitting investors to purchase, for present value, the right to collect the death benefit on life insurance issued to a person who allegedly is terminally ill. The investment and insurance transactions are manipulated against the interests of the insurer, insured, policy owner and investor. Because of the securities nature of the investment component, these cases are worked with the Department of Corporations.
• Insurance Company Deceptive Practices/Condoning Sales Force Misconduct – Insurers may fail to properly monitor and control their sales forces, in part because they are seen as independent contractors. The failure in extreme cases may involve ignoring complaints and other evidence of sales force misconduct or even training and encouraging misconduct.
• Phony Insurance Companies – A type of scheme that runs the gamut of selling falsified paper that appears to be an insurance policy or contract. This includes everything from phony insurance cards sold in DMV parking lots to fully-operational offshore insurance companies issuing policies they have no intention of honoring.
• Private Passenger Auto Insurance Consumer Abuse – Certain high-volume private passenger automobile agencies concentrate on the less desirable auto insurance risks. These include people with bad driving records, young drivers, people who have never had insurance before and people who cannot afford insurance. Some agencies focus on consumer abuse.
• Bail Industry Misconduct – Bail Agents are unique in the insurance field, in their personal control of arrestees released to them, acting as “a jail of the arrestees own choosing.” They control the essential components of the insurance company claim settlement under the bail collateral system. Their conduct can easily affect an insurer’s finances adversely and, of course, theft and personal integrity issues affecting a bail agent are highly serious to all concerned. This is the newest priority for the division.