Up to 65 Claims Management Companies (CMCs) have been warned in regards to compliance with the referral fee ban in the first quarter of 2014, the Claims Management Regulator (CMR) has confirmed.
The CMR confirmed that they have been carrying out a program of revisits to CMCs to ensure that they are still following the correct protocols following the introduction of the ban in 2013 and that some business models were still causing concern.
They also revealed that they have launched a mystery shopping exercise to crack down on companies that buy and sell marketing leads in breach of the ban.
Overall 85 companies were looked into with 65 warnings being handed out. More positively, only one full investigation has been carried out over the revisits.
Of course recent figures, released earlier this year, showed a decrease in the number of CMCs operating within the personal injury profession since the introduction of the ban, in what has been seen as a fraud cleansing period.
The CMR has been extremely proactive in terms of ensuring that the rules of the ban are being adhered to. They said in a statement: “Since the referral fee ban came into effect, the regulator has visited over 900 CMCs.”
It also revealed that it had identified 10 direct marketing companies, they believe could potentially be engaged in providing regulated claims management services without authorisation and that investigations were continuing into two CMCs for non compliant marketing, and another two had received warnings regarding lead generation.