A customer takes out gadget cover on a Tuesday. Three weeks later they claim for a cracked screen. Was the screen cracked before the policy started?
For most phone policies, nobody can say. The insurer has the make, the model and maybe the IMEI the customer typed into a form. It doesn’t have any record of what the phone actually looked like on day one. So when the claim arrives, the question that matters most, when did this damage happen?, has no evidence on either side.
A small claim, a big category
Gadget cover is a mass-market product. The Financial Conduct Authority’s latest value measures data counts 7.5 million gadget insurance policies in force in the UK in 2025 (FCA, 2026). Even a small share of claims for damage that predates cover adds up across a book that size.
The wider fraud picture points the same way. The Association of British Insurers reports that insurers detected £1.16 billion of fraudulent general insurance claims in 2024, across more than 98,400 claims (ABI, November 2025). The most common type was exaggerated loss, where someone pushes a claim beyond its true value. It rose 10% to £466 million.
Those figures cover all general insurance, not just phones, and they only count fraud that was detected. Claiming for damage that was already there is hard to detect by design: without a baseline, it looks exactly like an honest claim.
Some people don’t even see it as fraud. In a Cifas survey of 2,000 UK adults, 19% believed it was legal to claim for accidental damage to their phone even if it happened before they took out insurance (Cifas, February 2025). It isn’t legal: Cifas is clear that this is fraud.
Why the usual checks don’t help
Insurers have a few options today, and each has a gap:
- Asking the customer. A tick box saying “my phone is undamaged” costs nothing to tick.
- Asking for photos. A photo proves a phone was undamaged, but not that it was this phone. A picture of a friend’s handset, or one found online, looks the same.
- Inspecting in person. Reliable, but slow and expensive, and nobody wants to post their phone off before their cover starts.
What’s missing is evidence that is cheap to collect, quick for the customer, and tied to the specific device being insured.
Record the condition when the policy starts
The fix is to check the phone at the point of sale, the same way a car hire company walks round the car before you drive off.
With Lustre, the policyholder gets a link and opens it on the phone being insured. In about two minutes, in the phone’s own browser with no app:
- They photograph the screen in a mirror. A one-time code shown on the screen during the photo helps show the picture is of this phone, taken during this check.
- They photograph the back and camera. Cases come off, and anything that can’t is declared and noted.
- They screenshot their IMEI. It’s read on the device, looked up independently, and matched against the make and model on the policy.
You get the result by API or webhook: a damage analysis of the screen and the back, and an independent IMEI lookup. That’s a dated record of the phone’s condition, tied to its identity, from before cover began.
Then check again at claim time
The same check works when a claim comes in. Now you have two records of the same IMEI: one from the start of the policy and one from the claim. If the screen was clear at sale and is cracked now, the damage happened on cover. If it was already cracked, you have the evidence to say so.
That changes the conversation with the customer, too. A clear record protects honest policyholders as much as it deters the occasional dishonest one: their claim doesn’t need extra scrutiny when the evidence is already on file.
Getting started
Checking at policy sale works best when it’s part of the buying journey rather than a separate step. One API call creates a check and returns a link. You can send the link yourself, or have Lustre text it to the customer. You only pay for checks that are completed.
If you’re weighing up checks at sale, at claim, or both, talk to us. For how the same approach helps when the phone is changing hands rather than being insured, read why trade-in quotes get cut on arrival.
Sources
- Financial Conduct Authority, General insurance value measures data 2025, published July 2026.
- Association of British Insurers, Fraudulent insurance claims continue to top £1 billion, 17 November 2025.
- Cifas, A fifth of people believe it is legal to claim for pre-existing phone damage on new insurance policies, 25 February 2025. Survey of 2,000 UK adults by Opinion Matters, May 2024.