Investigation finds Hotmail email addresses cost you more with some insurers
One of the top UK car insurance companies have confessed to charging customers more for their car insurance if they use a Hotmail email address.
Admiral charges users with a Hotmail email address around £31.36 more for their car insurance compared to those who use a Gmail email address.
Anyone who applies for car insurance with Admiral through a Hotmail email address could end up paying more for their insurance.
Could your email address be making your car insurance pricier?
When investigators looked they discovered that when you changed the email address whilst applying for a quote from a Gmail address to a Hotmail email address, the price for insuring your car jumped up by around £31.36.
According to Admiral, they use “a variety of pieces of information” to determine how much an insurance premium will be but did confess that domain names were one source they looked at, particularly the part that comes after the ‘@’ found in an email address.
A statement from the company read: “Certain domain names are associated with more accidents than others”, which explained why Hotmail email addresses are likely to lead to higher premiums.
The Sun newspaper was responsible for the investigation and carried out a number of insurance applications through comparison websites such as Confused, GoCompare and MoneySuperMarket.
The only detail that was changed was the email address from Gmail to Hotmail and when doing so, the price for an insurance premium quote increased by £5.60 with Confused, an alarming £31.36 through GoCompare and £6.57 with MoneySuperMarket.
Insurance industry practices have been called into question many times and only last year it was reported that customers were being charged around 19% more for their premiums if they paid on a monthly basis rather than for a year upfront.
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