Esurance shady premium increases Internet

In comparing car insurance policies, I found esurance offered the lowest premium for my needs. I thus purchased a policy on March 2 (a Thursday).

The following Sunday I checked my email and found a premium increase notice from esurance. The notice stated that, after checking my credit report, it was determined that my premium should have been $65 higher. The notice stated that if I canceled my policy within 48 hours I would receive a full refund of my premium. The email was sent Saturday morning at 9:30.

Here are the reasons why I will not be renewing my policy, and why I would strongly advise fellow consumers against patronizing esurance:

1) My credit is poor, but in no way reflects the likelihood that I will be involved in an accident. In fact, in 12 years of driving, I have never been involved in an accident, have never filed an insurance claim, and have never had an action filed against me. Sure, this is an industry-wide practice. But that doesn't make it any more acceptable. Sure, there is a correlation between credit scores and likelihood of claims, but there is a much stronger correlation with past driving history.

Think about it this way: esurance (and, to be honest, pretty much every other insurer) is looking at every different way they can RAISE your rate, but refuses to look to driving history to determine whether such an increase is actually justified.

2) It's not so much that esurance based my rate on my credit as it is the deceptive way they went about it. In shopping for insurance I was told by EVERY other company that my rate would be dependent on my credit score. EVERY other company checked my credit up front and gave me an accurate quote. esurance, on the other hand, gave me an inaccurate up front quote because they did not check my credit before-hand, nor did they tell me that my credit would be a factor at all.

Look, I'm no idiot. I know that the people buying car insurance from some oddball website probably tend to be the same type of people who have bad credit (i.e. myself). So it appears as though esurance is operating a definitive bait-and-switch operation: give consumers an inaccurately low quote up front, and, after they purchase, check the credit and jack up the rate to above what they would have paid elsewhere.

3) Notice, in my story, that I was notified of the rate increase via an email that was sent on a Saturday morning. The notice gave me 48 hours to cancel my policy without penalty.

How am I supposed to shop for a substitute policy between 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday and 9:30 a.m. the following Monday? And the 48 hour window assumes that I read the email as soon as I received it, which I did not, and which I would assume most people would not.

In all reality, esurance gave me 30 minutes to find an alternative policy. In my mind, that's prima facie evidence that this is a scam (when considered in conjunction with factors 1 and 2).

I sent esurance customer service an email detailing these grievances. They responded seven days later with a form letter explaining why they use credit scores, but failing to explain why my notice came on a Saturday morning, or why my credit score wasn't checked before I signed on, or why it took them two days to obtain my credit score.

Avoid esurance. Don't assume that their low-ball rate is what you will actually end up paying. Based on the other complaints on here, it doesn't look like what happened to me was an isolated incident.

Timothy
Valparaiso, Indiana
U.S.A.