I named my parent as life policy beneficiary, but insurer listed a complete stranger!

Consumer ninja Wendy Knowler shares this life insurance horror story on the The Money Show.

Issues with life policies regularly come under the scrutiny of consumer journalist Wendy Knowler.

This week on The Money Show, she asks you to imagine taking out a life policy which names a parent as a beneficiary, only to discover later that this name is nowhere to be seen on the document.

Knowler relates the horror story of Matthew Kanniah, who found during a random check that the name and ID number of a complete stranger was listed instead of his parent!

Kanniah had taken out the policy in 2022 with Discovery Life - in the event of a claim, would his mother not have been paid out?

The Discovery client went public with the story on X, tweeting:

“A Discovery Life agent… added his or her own mother as a beneficiary for my life cover. When I signed up, I added my parent who has the same surname as me... I submitted new documents last year and still it has not been changed.”

RELATED: What happens if you find out a beneficiary you paid for on a policy was never listed?

Matthew told Knowler that after posting this tweet a Discovery Life 'higher up' called him to apologise.

And they closed off the whole episode with a tweet, which read:

“Thanks for taking our calls, Mr Kanniah, we apologise for the inconvenience caused. This was an isolated error and we would like to reassure you that it would not have led to any payments being made to the wrong beneficiary.”

When Knowler followed up with Discovery, they gave the assurance that Kanniah's case was 'a unique and isolated' one where multiple beneficiary identifier fields (including date of birth) coincidentally matched.

This resulted in the incorrect beneficiary name displaying on the app.

"When signing up for the policy, Mr Kanniah was not able to provide his mother’s full ID number and her date of birth was provided as an identifier, which contributed to the mismatching of beneficiaries’ names."
 
"An important thing to note is that this error would never have resulted in any erroneous payments."

Discovery Life

In conclusion, Knowler points out that, as we've seen, there IS such a thing as insurance fraud.

In other words, go and CHECK that your listed beneficiaries are your actual chosen beneficiaries.

To hear more detail, listen to Knowler's report in the interview audio