What's next for ghost broking - and why current trends may mislead

Point-in-time analysis of the National SIRA risk intelligence consortium, undertaken in the last quarter of 2025, showed a slowing in overall reports of ghost brokered insurance policies.

Reports were still up around 8% compared to the previous calendar period, but that growth is significantly lower than the record 2023-2024 63% increase Synectics shared.

Disruption to the growth pattern insurers have come to expect

This movement bucks ghost broking trendlines of recent times. After several years of headline-grabbing growth – fuelled by ghost brokers expanding their operations via social media – a slower growth trajectory raises an urgent question.

That is, could ghost broking genuinely be on a downward slope? Or is slowing growth the first sign of a developing blind spot?

The most likely next move for ghost brokers

This is a question Synectics’ researchers and strategists are actively working to answer. Their findings will be shared in our upcoming Signals: Future of Fraud Report featuring intelligence deep-dives and data-backed predictions for 2026.

Given the rapid maturation of “Fraud as a Service” via Instagram and TikTok throughout 2025 - paired with the AI-generated fake document boom - we’re expecting to see ghost broking take on a new complexion.

As distribution becomes easier, fraud MOs tend to diversify and traditional patterns become less reliable.

Need-to-know insight: policy detection and victim locations diverge

In our point-in-time snapshot, National SIRA data still shows familiar geographic hotspots for ghost-brokered policy detections.

These remain concentrated in lower-premium regions, where driver identities and policy histories are more likely to suppress quoted prices. The South West continues to dominate.

What’s changed is where ghost broking victims are being flagged.

The postcode hotspots for victims still follow patterns for low premiums, including the Scottish Highlands and coastal areas of the East Midlands, consistent with our earlier postcode-crisis research.

But, when insurers are able to confirm a victim – mostly interpreted as someone whose identity, address or policy details have been used without their knowledge – there isn’t a consistent geographic match with where ghost brokered policies are detected.

Better victim detection, but an expanding intelligence gap

This insight points to an intelligence gap that due to the increasingly sophisticated nature of ghost broking, has accelerated faster than some controls can keep up.

The positive news is that far more victims are now being detected by insurers thanks to Synectics’ Victim Status. This reporting option allows organsiations to distinguish victims from criminals and ensure that those whose identities have unknowingly been used to facilitate crime don’t face further harm.

Greater visibility in this area is urgently needed. Across National SIRA, we’ve found chronic reuse of stolen IDs linked to ghost broking across other sectors, products and policies. When these ghost broking victims are identified – and shared between consortium members – we take a step forward in removing a stolen ID from criminal rotation, and uninsured drivers from the roads.

What comes next?

Victim patterns only become clear when using deep contextual data and linking individual cases across products, organisations and sectors.

We examine how ghost broking is maturing and where risk is likely to surface next in Signals, our upcoming market-first, exclusive intelligence report. Get notified when Signals lands here.