Admiral Insurance found to give higher quotes to Hotmail users and people called Mohammed

Applicants' names and email addresses used to calculate insurance premiums

A UK insurance company is using applicants' names and email addresses as factors in calculating premiums, an investigation has found.

Reporters at The Sun applied for motor insurance quotes through price comparison sites using dummy profiles that were identical apart from the email address. For one insurer in particular, Admiral, the resulting quotes were quite different.

"We found that on comparison website GoCompare, Admiral charged a Hotmail driver £467.04 and a Gmail one £435.68 — £31.36 less," the reporters said.

Admiral has said that email domains do in fact correlate with a driver's risk of making a claim.

"Certain domain names are associated with more accidents than others," the company said.

However, as with all such 'black box' algorithms, how it would arrive at such a conclusion and how this would result in such a different level of quote can only be guessed at.

The reporters only compared results with Hotmail and Gmail, but it would be interesting to see the result for users of thrice-hacked Yahoo Mail, or customers of more esoteric domains such as death-star.com, racedriver.com, crazysexycool.com or reallyfast.biz.

Perhaps we should all sign up for a bland email address just for the purpose of buying insurance and other algorithmically priced services.

More insidiously perhaps, your given name can also affect your premium - quite substantially in some cases.

The reporters applied for insurance through GoCompare as "John Smith" requiring a fully comprehensive package for a 2007 Ford Focus in Leicester. This resulted in a quote for £1,333. However, for "Mohammed Ali" the same deal was £2,252 - or £919 more.

"We got 60 quotes via GoCompare, plus others using rival comparison sites," The Sun said.

Once again Admiral was singled out.

"The sites [such as GoCompare] do not calculate figures themselves but simply show results from insurers. Admiral and its sister companies Diamond, Bell and Elephant always quoted more if the driver was called Mohammed," the paper said.

Admiral was not alone in its discriminatory algorithms, however. M&S Insurance also bumped up the price based on the applicant's name alone.

Admiral boss David Stevens blamed its anti-fraud software for the differences in quotes, while M&S promised to look into the matter.