Avoiding Scams / Verify a Company Is Legitimate
How to verify an insurance company is legitimate
Before you hand over your health history, personal information, or a payment, a few professional checks are enough to confirm you're actually dealing with who you think you are. None of them take more than a few minutes, and every one of them is free.
Check the state license — for the company and the agent
Every state has an insurance department (sometimes called a Department of Insurance, sometimes a Division of Insurance) that licenses every company and every individual agent allowed to sell insurance there. That license is public record, and every state keeps a free lookup tool where you can search a company or agent by name and see whether their license is active and in good standing. If you're not sure how to find your specific state's regulator, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners keeps a directory at naic.org that can point you to the right one. This isn't a specialized skill — it's the same tool state regulators want ordinary consumers to use.
Ask for the agent's license number
An individual licensed agent is issued a National Producer Number, or NPN, when they become licensed — a unique ID that follows them regardless of which company they happen to be representing at the moment. A legitimate agent should be able to give you this number without hesitation if you ask, and it's searchable through the same state lookup tools mentioned above. If someone selling you a policy hesitates, deflects, or can't produce a license number at all, treat that as a reason to slow down and verify before going any further.
Pay attention to how you're asked to pay
Legitimate carriers collect premium in ordinary, traceable ways — a bank draft, a check made out to the insurance company itself, or a credit or debit card charged by the carrier directly. None of that requires an unusual payment method. If anyone asks you to pay by wire transfer, gift cards, cryptocurrency, or cash sent through the mail, stop — legitimate insurance companies do not ask for payment that way, ever. Those methods share one property that has nothing to do with insurance and everything to do with scams: once the money is sent, it's essentially impossible to trace or get back.
A good rule
If a payment method would also work for a stranger who called claiming to be a grandchild in trouble, it's not a payment method a real insurance company uses either.
Why we're fine with you checking us too
This site exists to connect people with licensed insurance agents, so it would be a little hollow to write a guide about verifying legitimacy without saying plainly: run these same checks on us. Ask for a license number. Look up the carriers being discussed with you. A legitimate agency has nothing to lose from a five-minute check — and honestly, you shouldn't have to just take anyone's word for it, including ours.