Fraud calls for roadside assistance card purchase after car buying

You may have purchased a brand new car and soon after purchase, you are getting a number of phone calls for purchase of roadside assistance card. In this article, I will explain the modus operandi of the callers and explain why one has to be careful with such calls.

Modus Operandi

First of all, I will explain the modus operandi of the callers with the help of my own example. I recently purchased a Maruti Suzuki car. Soon after car purchase, I received  a call for roadside assistance card. The caller introduced himself to be from Maruti Roadside Assistance team. He mentioned that Maruti, by default, don’t provide free roadside assistance. However, on payment of Rs. 2,500/-, I can get free road assistance for lifetime (i.e. 15 years of car) anywhere in India. I will be provided with a smart card and I have to call on a toll-free number to avail the facility.

Why to be careful?

Verifying with online roadside assistance provider

When I received first call, it was tempting enough for me to say yes. However wisdom prevailed on me and I decided to do an initial verification. I searched online for roadside assistance companies and came across few reputed ones.  The pricing details of one such provider is show below.

One can get the more details of the above plan from here: https://www.allianzroadassist.com/plan-4wheelers.php. This plan was for anywhere in India. Hence, naturally was on higher side. I then searched for city specific plan and one such plan by a provider is show below. More details can be found from here: https://www.crossroadshelpline.com/index.

Now you must have realized that it takes close to Rs. 900 per year (assuming price on the lowest side) for renowned players to provide the roadside assistance, then how can one provide it for Rs. 2500 for 15 years (roughly Rs. 167 per year)? Even if I use the facility for two times in a year, then Rs. 2500 will get balance out given the prevailing cost in India. It is clear that providing the service for 15 years is not feasible at such low cost.

Confirmation from Car Dealer

I called my relationship manager from the Maruti Nexa car dealer and asked him about these calls for road side assistance purchase. He informed that customers usually receive such calls after car purchase. However, these callers have nothing to do with Maruti and to be careful with them. After this, I decided not to say yes to such callers.

Truecaller

There is an app on Android named ‘Truecaller’ which provides caller name when phone calls come from unknown persons. However this app reports caller name only when data is ‘ON’ on mobile. For these roadside assistance card calls, most of the time the app reported them to be spam calls.

Pattern

Over the few days, I received a number of calls for roadside assistance purchase. I observed the following pattern in them:-

1. Callers know about our name and the car model we purchased. Somehow our data get leaked from our car dealer to them. This is similar to AMC calls for AC, refrigerator, RO water purifier etc. soon after purchase of them.
2. As soon as we pick up the call, the caller ask for confirming our name i.e. whether Mr. xyz is speaking? Once we say yes, he mention that he is calling either from Maruti roadside assistance or Maruti maintenance or Maruti breakdown department.
3. The caller will mention that Maruti is not providing free roadside assistance. However on payment of Rs.2500, it will provide the same free for 15 years anywhere in India. He will ask for home address, so that a person can be sent to our address for collecting the payment and providing us with a smart card. With that card, we can avail roadside assistance.
4. If we grill the caller more about his actual company name, then he will tell some company name which we can’t even search on Internet. For example: my car helpline, my car service, India car roadside assistance etc. These words are so common that we won’t be able to locate the company on Internet.

Roadside Assistance with Car Insurance Policy

Many are not aware that our car insurance providers have add-on cover for free road side assistance. This add-on cover’s cost is very cheap. For example, in case of ICICI Lombard, it costs just Rs. 199/-. One can go through the following page: https://www.icicilombard.com/car-insurance-info/What-is-road-side-assistance.html to know about all the services provided by ICICI Lombard under the add-on cover. Other insurance companies, more or less, provide the same facilities with similar cost. Hence, if we like to buy road side assistance, then better we take it from insurance companies as these are regulated and organized companies.

If you are receiving such calls or have some incident to report, then please help others by narrating here. This will surely help others in avoiding the trap. Have a nice day!