ComplaintsforThe Zebra

• Initial Complaint

  11/18/2021

  Complaint Type:

  Service or Repair Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  DO NOT share your phone number or email with this company. Within 24 hours of submitting a comparison request, I have been receiving scam texts non-stop. Nothing else would have triggered this pattern, and the initial e-texts were all semi-insurance linked, then it got worse from there. I report each on to ******** and delete, but this company is clearly a source of information to third party scammers. They should be investigated by the **** I want them to resolve their data breach/notify consumers, and face penalties from the **** I did not consent to random and persistent contact by fraudulent companies or phishing.

  Business response

  11/23/2021

  Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your complaint about a recent visit to The Zebra. We take issues of personal information and data privacy extremely seriously.

  
  Firstly, The Zebra is not the source of any unwanted texts or calls. Since August 2019, The Zebra no longer asks for a phone number as a part of its customer information questionnaire. To receive a quote, nowhere on TheZebra.com is a question field for users to input a phone number. In short, we don't have any customer phone numbers in our possessions and therefore cannot sell them to any third-party companies for the consumer to receive the "scam" contacts described. There is no data or privacy breach because we do not have this data in our systems. 

  
  We use the user's email address to send them a summary of their search results (from TheZebra.com) and follow-up reminders IF they haven't purchased a policy with us. These emails are easily unsubscribed through the link at the bottom of each. Occasionally, a user may receive a special rate offer from our partner at GEICO. Still, we do not share the email address with any other third-party companies.

  
  If the user is shopping for car ********************** quotes (using a common web search), the journey sometimes leads them to TheZebra.com as a final stop in their search. These websites are called "click exchanges" and offer up our website to finish their insurance search. Unfortunately, this means that the website that referred them to The Zebra (and may have asked for your phone number in that process) took your personal information and sold it to these terrible companies to bother you. 

  
  I completely understand how frustrating it is to receive "scam" contacts (I get them constantly myself) and how complicated it must be to trace the origins of where your personal information was compromised. One of the main reasons we removed the phone number question from our site over two years ago was to have this ability to be 100% sure we were not the source since we don't ask for that information. 
  This page describes how The Zebra works (and what we don't do... like sell people's information): https://www.thezebra.com/about/how-the-zebra-works/

  
  We truly hate to hear that you're the recipient of these awful contacts. The Zebra exists for this exact reason; to offer a hassle-free insurance comparison experience without having to trade personal information to find cost savings. I hope that this transparency into our process and business model is a sufficient explanation. If you have further questions, please get in touch with me directly at [email protected]

  
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