An awful lot of people use the Internet these days for a variety of things. As a taxi driver you may decide to purchase your taxi insurance online as it is something that you can sometimes do 24/7 365 days a year.

Let us hope that you never have to claim on your taxi insurance policy but if you do you will want to be confident that, at what is a difficult enough situation often involving you feeling stressed, that you do not fall foul of the likes of something called Paid Ad Spoofing.

So, what is Paid Ad Spoofing? Well, you know when you go on the Internet and do a search through your browser the search engine that you use often shows adverts from businesses that pay to appear at the top of the page and sometimes at the bottom of the page as well. It may be that one or more of those adverts could have been placed there by scammers. Scammers also sometimes place such adverts on social media platforms.

A scammer will create a website that is made to look quite genuine when in fact the scammer is hoping that you contact them with a view to extracting money from you or putting malware on the likes of your computer, tablet or mobile phone or trying to obtain your personal information with a view to using such data fraudulently.

As we said earlier, should you be involved in a road traffic accident or have your taxi stolen, it may be a stressful time and you will be keen to contact your insurance company’s claims department as quickly as possible to start the claims process. You may rush and just go on the Internet to find a phone number for the claims department of your taxi insurer. If it is a Paid Ad Spoofing website then you could end up speaking to someone with ill intentions.

So, how do you do your best to avoid falling into such a trap? Well, you could hunt out your original documents from when you took out the taxi insurance policy as they are likely to contain the contact details of the claims department of the insurance company. An insurance company is not usually going to publish their claims line phone number under a Sponsored advertisement so ignore such websites and look further down the page to the normal unsponsored websites. You could consider loading the official mobile app of the taxi insurance company and access the contact details from it. Make sure that you have installed suitable anti- malware or antivirus software on your devise. Make sure that you verify the website i.e. does it have a security padlock icon up in the address bar that starts with https://.

Another useful tip is that when you take out your taxi insurance that you save the claims contact phone number of your insurer in the contact section of your mobile phone. So, if you are unfortunate to have to claim on your policy you can do so quickly and safely.

We hope that the above is of benefit to you.