Auto Insurance Fraud Statistics Ontario [2026]

Auto insurance fraud costs Ontario drivers an estimated $1.6 billion every year, equivalent to $236 per policy, per Insurance Bureau of Canada 2021, based on a KPMG study for Ontario’s Anti-Fraud Task Force.

This post covers the Ontario data: fraud by type, premium impact, provincial comparisons, and the FSRA tools now active. For the national, all-insurance picture, see insurance fraud statistics Canada; the fraud pillar hub indexes the full cluster.

What is auto insurance fraud in Ontario

Auto insurance fraud in Ontario is any deliberate act of deception committed against the auto insurance system for financial gain. It covers staging collisions, inflating injury claims, submitting bills for treatments never rendered, misrepresenting vehicle use or garaging location on an application, and selling fake policies. It is both a civil breach under Ontario’s Insurance Act and a criminal offence under Canada’s Criminal Code.

Ontario’s Insurance Act (RSO 1990, c I.8, s. 233) voids any claim where the insured gives false particulars, misrepresents a material fact, or makes a false statement. The insured forfeits all rights to indemnity. Canada’s Criminal Code s. 380(1) treats fraud as an indictable offence. Fraud over $5,000 carries a maximum of 14 years’ imprisonment; fraud over $1 million triggers a mandatory minimum of two years, per Department of Justice Canada 2024.

Équité Association 2025 identifies six primary categories of insurance crime active in Ontario and Canada:

• Auto theft — vehicles stolen for resale, export, or parts
• Staged collisions — deliberate crashes engineered to produce injury and damage claims
• Medical-services fraud — billing for phantom physiotherapy, chiropractic, or other treatments
• Accident-benefits fraud — inflated injury claims under Ontario’s Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule
• Identity theft — using another person’s identity to obtain coverage or file claims
• Ghost brokering — unlicensed individuals selling fake or falsified auto insurance policies

The scale of the problem: key Ontario auto insurance fraud figures

The KPMG range was commissioned by Ontario’s Automobile Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force and reviewed by Ernst & Young. IBC has cited the upper bound ($1.6 billion, $236 per policy) through at least 2021. No updated province-wide all-fraud estimate has been published by a primary source since then. That data gap is what FSRA’s new Fraud Reporting Service Rule is designed to fill.

The FSRA 2022 consumer poll (n=1,027, fielded November 11–27, 2022) produced stark awareness numbers. 85% of Ontario policyholders reported never seeing any public fraud prevention information — a large awareness deficit that sustains the fraud environment, according to FSRA 2023.

Fraud by type: staged collisions, soft-tissue claims, and application fraud in Ontario

Staged collisions are among the most difficult fraud types for Ontario consumers to identify. Only 43% of FSRA’s 2022 survey respondents said they could recognize a staged collision as insurance fraud, compared with 51% who could identify a fake pink slip, per FSRA 2023. The gap between those two figures reflects how organized the staged-collision schemes have become: perpetrators often use real crashes with unwitting third-party motorists, making victim recognition nearly impossible.

Aviva Canada, one of Ontario’s largest auto insurers, recorded a 76% increase in claims fraud investigations from 2023 to 2024. Auto-related incidents accounted for 67% of all fraud cases it investigated. Staged accidents surged 47% in Q4 2024 alone, per Aviva Canada’s March 2025 Fraud Prevention Month data release.

Project Outsource was a joint operation involving Peel Regional Police, OPP, Halton Regional Police, York Regional Police, and Toronto Police Service. As of June 2025, it resulted in 18 people charged with 97 criminal offences. Investigators uncovered an organized network staging vehicle collisions and using extortion and firearms to control local towing operations in the GTA, per Peel Regional Police 2025. The same organized-crime dynamic that drives staged collisions has a direct overlap with auto theft; the auto theft statistics Ontario post covers that intersection in detail.

Ghost brokering is a separate but growing fraud type in Ontario. Unlicensed individuals sell fake auto insurance policies or manipulate coverage details to obtain lower premiums for clients. FSRA identifies it as one of the trends that distort the risk pool and raise costs for honest policyholders, per FSRA regulatory guidance 2024.

How fraud inflates Ontario auto insurance premiums

Ontario drivers pay the highest average auto insurance premiums in Canada. Statistics Canada 2025 recorded an average annual premium of $2,068 in Ontario as of December 2024, compared with $1,818 in Alberta, $1,522 in British Columbia, and $1,044 in Quebec.

Fraud drives this premium through two mechanisms. First, every fraudulent claim paid out must be recovered from all policyholders through higher rates. IBC estimates fraud adds $236 per policy annually from all fraud forms; auto theft alone adds approximately $130 per policy, per IBC 2024. Second, fraud detection and investigation infrastructure is itself a cost that insurers embed in rates.

The 2023 claims environment made this dynamic acute. Ontario insurers’ comprehensive claims loss ratio reached 190% that year, meaning companies paid out $1.90 for every $1.00 collected in comprehensive premiums. The surge in auto theft and related crime drove that result, per Statistics Canada’s April 2025 study. That underwriting deficit either exits the market or drives rate filings.

Ontario’s 10-year annualized premium growth rate of 3.5% is actually the second-lowest among Canadian provinces, per the same Statistics Canada study. Alberta’s rate rose 6.6% annualized over the same period. Ontario’s premium is high not primarily because rates are rising fastest, but because the baseline reflects years of embedded fraud, theft, and litigation costs that never fully reset.

How Ontario compares: provincial insurance fraud cost benchmarks

Source: Statistics Canada 2025; IBC 2024; Équité Association 2026.

Ontario’s 524% increase in auto theft claims (2018–2023) is the steepest provincial increase in Canada, far above the national average of 254%, per IBC 2024. In 2023, Ontario became the first province to exceed $1 billion in annual auto theft claims alone.

National auto theft claims fell from $1.5 billion in 2023 to approximately $900 million in 2025 following government and industry interventions. Ontario posted a 22% decline and Quebec a 25% decline, per Équité Association 2026. Ontario and Quebec remain the most heavily affected provinces for auto-related insurance crime in Canada. For how auto fraud fits within the wider national picture across all fraud types, see our fraud statistics Canada overview.

Ontario and Alberta had the highest auto insurance premiums in Canada across the full 2020–2024 study period. Both provinces’ insurers operated with combined ratios near or above 100% (meaning underwriting alone generated no profit), driven by theft, fraud, and legal cost pressures, per Statistics Canada’s study.

Ontario’s premium is 98% higher than Quebec’s, 14% higher than Alberta’s, and 36% higher than British Columbia’s as of December 2024.

The regulatory response: FSRA, HCAI, and the Ontario Anti-Fraud Task Force

Ontario’s regulatory architecture for auto insurance fraud rests on three pillars built over more than a decade.

The first was the Ontario Automobile Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force, appointed by the provincial government in 2011 and issuing its final report on November 22, 2012. Its recommendations led directly to the Fighting Fraud and Reducing Automobile Insurance Rates Act, 2014. That Act created the legislative foundation for health-service-provider licensing and the current oversight framework, per Government of Ontario 2012.

Health Claims for Auto Insurance (HCAI) is the mandatory electronic system for transmitting auto insurance health claim forms between Ontario insurers and health-care providers. It allows FSRA and insurers to identify billing anomalies and suspicious claims patterns in accident-benefits submissions. HCAI is the cornerstone of Ontario’s medical-fraud detection infrastructure, per FSRA 2024.

FSRA itself has significantly escalated enforcement. The regulator initiated 100 enforcement actions in fiscal 2024–25, up from 65 the prior year. It imposed administrative monetary penalties totalling $1.2 million and issued 25 orders to revoke or refuse licences across the mortgage and insurance sectors, per FSRA 2025.

The most significant new development is the Fraud Reporting Service (FRS) Rule, approved by the Minister of Finance in June 2025. The Rule requires all Ontario automobile insurers to submit ongoing fraud-incident data to FSRA. For the first time, Ontario will have a provincial fraud baseline to track trends and support targeted enforcement. The operationalization target is December 2026, per FSRA FRS Rule 2025. When that data pipeline is live, the KPMG 2010 baseline will finally have an official successor.

What this means for Ontario drivers

The gap between fraud awareness and fraud action is the most operationally useful finding in this dataset. 76% of Ontario respondents in FSRA’s 2022 poll agreed that consumers can play a role in preventing fraud. Yet only 55% said they were confident they could identify fraud if it were occurring. Only 20% of Ontario auto insurance holders know how and where to report it, while 69% say there is insufficient public education on prevention, per FSRA 2023.

For drivers, the practical implications are straightforward:

• Document every collision at the scene, regardless of apparent severity — photograph all vehicles, license plates, and occupants; note the number of passengers; record tow truck company name and driver.
• Be alert to flash crashes where the car ahead brakes suddenly with no apparent hazard — a common staged-collision technique in the GTA.
• Verify your broker is licensed through FSRA’s public registry before buying or renewing coverage; ghost brokering typically surfaces when a claim is denied because no valid policy exists.
• Report suspicions to FSRA at fsrao.ca/consumers/auto-insurance/submit-auto-insurance-fraud-tip, or to the IBC tip line. For staged collisions involving organized networks, file a police report as well.

FSRA’s Fraud Reporting Service Rule, targeting December 2026, will create a centralized insurer-to-regulator fraud data pipeline for the first time in Ontario’s history.

As licensed PIs working across the Greater Toronto Area, we see the downstream consequences of staged collisions regularly in our insurance investigations work. Staged-collision networks share infrastructure with auto theft rings — tow operators, body shops, and medical clinics often appear in both streams. When a client’s insurer suspects organized fraud, the evidence-gathering clock starts the moment a vehicle is towed from the scene.

Fraud sources and methodology

The $768 million–$1.56 billion cost range cited throughout this post comes from a 2010 study commissioned by Ontario’s Automobile Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force. Ernst & Young reviewed the methodology, and the Task Force used it as the policy baseline. IBC cited the upper bound ($1.6 billion, $236 per policy) through at least 2021, per Government of Ontario 2012.

No updated province-wide all-fraud estimate has been published on a primary source since 2012. FSRA’s Fraud Reporting Service Rule, operationalizing by December 2026, is the mechanism intended to generate updated province-level data.

National auto theft claims data draws on Équité Association’s annual trend reports (most recently the 2025 report published February 11, 2026, covering 2025 calendar-year trends) and IBC. FSRA enforcement figures come from FSRA’s first Enforcement Annual Report (fiscal 2024–25). Provincial premium comparisons come from Statistics Canada’s April 2, 2025 study (catalogue no. 11-621-M). Aviva Canada’s claims fraud data is from Aviva Canada’s March 2025 Fraud Prevention Month release.