Lawsuit Alleges GEICO Failed to Correct Inaccurate Info Furnished to Consumer Reporting Agencies

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GEICO faces a proposed class action filed by a California consumer who claims the insurance company failed to correct inaccurate information it furnished about her, even after she made several disputes.

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The 19-page case explains that GEICO shares details about its policyholders’ insurance claims with LexisNexis, which in turn uses this data to prepare Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE) reports for these customers. According to the lawsuit, insurance companies can use a consumer’s CLUE report to evaluate their risk profile and make underwriting decisions.

The plaintiff, a GEICO auto insurance policyholder, alleges the company provided LexisNexis with information that erroneously associated her with the insurance policy of another GEICO customer who shares her last name but has “no relationship” with the plaintiff whatsoever. The customer’s wife had been involved in an at-fault accident, and this insurance claim was wrongly included in the CLUE report LexisNexis created for the plaintiff in March 2023, the complaint contends.

The woman says that she disputed the information with LexisNexis a total of four times over the course of several months. Although the CLUE report generator repeatedly notified GEICO of the plaintiff’s disputes, the defendant continuously failed to resolve the situation, the suit claims.

“The information harmed [the plaintiff] by, without limitation, falsely portraying her as an unsafe driver with a tarnished insurance claim history who was riskier to insure than someone without such a history,” the case says. As a result of GEICO’s “negligent, willful, or reckless” conduct, the company that received the woman’s CLUE report quoted her much higher auto insurance premiums compared to what she should have been offered, the filing argues.

Per the filing, the plaintiff also contacted GEICO Casualty Company twice about the inaccurate information. The GEICO affiliate, in correspondence sent in June 2023 and August 2023, informed the woman that it had determined she was “not the driver involved in this loss” and had “updated the claim to reflect our driver’s correct name and date of birth,” the suit shares.

Nevertheless, the inaccurate information associating the plaintiff with someone else’s at-fault insurance claim remained in her LexisNexis file until September 29, 2023, the complaint contends.

Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the defendant was obligated to correct erroneous information after receiving notice of the customer’s dispute from a consumer reporting agency, the case says. The suit argues that GEICO also “negligently or willfully” failed to instruct LexisNexis to mark the disputed information as “disputed,” as required by the FCRA.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in the United States or its territories for whom GEICO, within the past two years, failed to correct or remove disputed information after it received notice of the disputes from a consumer reporting agency and the defendant or one of its affiliates had previously determined that the disputing individual was not the driver involved in the loss that was the subject of the disputed information.

The suit also seeks to cover anyone in the United States or its territories for whom GEICO, within the past two years, failed to mark disputed information as “disputed” when it subsequently furnished the information to the consumer reporting agency from which it had received notice of the dispute.

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