Cingular Wireless LLC has filed suit against insurance companies and brokers, alleging that the insurers paid over $1 billion in [tag]kickbacks[\/tag] to the brokers if sent business their way. The lawsuit names brokers Marsh & McLennan and Aon Corp, and insurers American International Group Inc. (AIG), Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp., The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., and The St. Paul Travelers Companies Inc.<\/p>\n
Marsh has offered $850 million and AIG has offered $1.6 billion to settle similar claims brought by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in October 2004. Cingular declined to participate in that settlement in order to pursue its own case.<\/p>\n
Cingular claims that the kickbacks to Marsh increased the company’s earnings by $800 million just in 2003. As a result, it is alleged that customers purchasing insurance paid more than they should have for their coverage.<\/p>\n
Cingular is also alleging that [tag]bid-rigging[\/tag] occurred. When Cingular asked its broker to shop around for better insurance prices, the broker would obtain inflated quotes from two companies and claim that Cingular was already getting a good deal on insurance rates. This would induce Cingular to stick with its current insurance company, who was allegedly working behind the scenes with the broker to keep the business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cingular Wireless LLC has filed suit against insurance companies and brokers, alleging that the insurers paid over $1 billion in [tag]kickbacks[\/tag] to the brokers if sent business their way. The lawsuit names brokers Marsh & McLennan and Aon Corp, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fraud-news-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-3k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}