A plight of life insurance policyholder

Suddenly, In January 2021, an amount of Rs 3,13,110 was withdrawn from Rawat's bank account through ACH without any intimation and authorisation. The amount was nowhere related to his purchased policies

Mumbai: A policyholder, who claims to have lost huge amount of money to the insurer due to the alleged mis-selling of high value policies to him, continues to fight for getting his money recovered from the insurer. In February 2018, two representatives of Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance approached New Delhi-based Ajay Rawat for purchasing life insurance policies from the company. On their insistence, he purchased five policies from the company for his family.

With the time, Rawat made payments to Edelweiss for the renewal of the above policies and for onetime payment investments with the company. As he made payments to the company for renewal of his policies and investments with the company by making payments directly to the company, he never doubted the intentions of the company and their employees.

Suddenly, In January 2021, an amount of Rs 3,13,110 was withdrawn from Rawat's bank account through ACH without any intimation and authorisation. The amount was nowhere related to his purchased policies. Then the policyholder contacted the employees of the company, but he could not get any reasonable answer. "In the meantime, I came to know that the employees who were coming to me for selling the policies and collecting the payments were terminated by the company," Rawat says Bizz Buzz.

In February, another employee from Janak Puri office of the company contacted him and told Rawat that a number of policies have been issued to him and his family members. "The employee with one of colleagues visited me on February 28 and explained me the entire status," Rawat said.

In addition to the already purchased policies, few more policies were issued to Rawat with the payments made by him to the company. "With the above, I also came to know that above policies were issued with wrong addresses, phone number and email IDs," Rawat said. As such, he never received any documents and communication relating to these policies. All these policies were issued by misappropriating the renewal/investment payments made by him to the company without any proposal from Rawat.

After noticing such a breach of trust and misuse of personal data by the company and their employees, Rawat reported the matter to grievance redressal officer (GRO) of the company.

After several communications, the GRO of the company finally told him that the policies were issued post discussion with him and when they did not hear anything during the 15 days' free look period, they considered to be all in line.

"I insisted couple of times the GRO to share with me the details of my agreement to the proposal of these policies and also to share as to where these policies were delivered and received. The same email was repeated in answer without sharing the details request," Rawat said.

Since then, Rawat has been living in constant fear of losing money, he has already paid and more unauthorised withdrawals from his bank accounts. "I am really in bad shape in terms of mental trauma and sinking physical health," he said.

When approached by Bizz Buzz, the company said in a statement, "Edelweiss Tokio Life has a robust customer onboarding process and appropriate due diligence is done in its accordance before issuance of policies. We also communicate at different intervals with the customer after policy issuance. All the processes were abided by in this case and there were no lapses noted for the policies issued since 2018, until very recently when the customer expressed dissatisfaction. We thoroughly investigated the customer's concerns and based on the facts of the case have sent him a detailed response. As a customer-centric organisation, customers' interests are of paramount importance to us and we take every grievance seriously."