That doesn't really answer the original question at all.
The question wasn't "is this particular case fraudulent for any reason what-so-ever".
The question was "is buying insurance on something you already know is going to happen" plain and simple fraud?
The identity fraud isn't really relevant to that question at all.
FWIW I'm not aware of any law in the USA that makes it illegal to buy insurance when you know the policy will pay. Knowing more than the insurance company's actuaries is not fraud. Making false statements is fraud. Intentionally causing damage to collect insurance payments is fraud. But the hypothetical oracle who knows when the next flood/fire/car accident will hit due to divine inspiration is free to buy a relevant insurance policy the day before. AFAIK.
Novemberwhiskey (above) makes the solid point about entering into the contract in good faith. It is a sound counterpoint and appeals to the more important "spirit of the law" vs "letter of the law". I am not sure how this would stand up to a court ruling.
The good faith relationship with respect to insurance contracts in common law countries is the letter of the law. The relationship between an insured and insurer is a special relationship and is subject to separate obligations to those which arise out of the contract itself.
The insured has a duty to disclose everything that is or would be material to the insurer, even if that information is known only to the insured.
> The insured has a duty to disclose everything that is or would be material to the insurer, even if that information is known only to the insured.
I wrote a super long comment below, but on a more fundamental level... how?
Especially for something like travel insurance. Anyone the average consumer gets to talk to about a travel insurance policy is going to be some call center jockey being paid on commission.
In fact, my insurance agent sold me a home insurance add-on for personal electronics. Their pricing didn't take into account the cost of the covered electronics. Replaced some very expensive hardware after (inevitable) failures. When I purchased the policy, I sent my agent and email pointing out that I has some super expensive electronics, expected short shelf life, and was pretty damn certain that the policy had positive expected value.
The agent straight up asked why I wouldn't buy the policy in that case!
That product was discontinued, of course. The insurance company tried to claw back one of their payments until I showed them my emails with their agent. But the fact that they even tried is... telling. And I'm just lucky they didn't press the issue, because I probably wouldn't have bothered going to court over a few hundred dollars in wasted payments.
There's a fundamental problem with trying to apply this sort of legal doctrine when most consumers are unsophisticated and don't have access to the same data as the insurer. The fact that we only ever get to talk to sales people compounds the problem.
I don't think uberrima fides is super helpful here:
a) I have a really, really, REALLY hard time understanding how hiring an army of PhDs to build highly proprietary risk models based on extremely expensive (or not-even-for-sale) datasets does not run a foul of uberrima fides. The doctrine only makes sense if it forbids both parties, not just the insured, from concealing information. If I were on a jury and the entire case hung on a reasonable man's interpretation of uberrima fides, I would have a hard time ever finding in favor of a modern insurer who's unwilling to share their models and data with the world. I mean, I might agree that the insured hid information. But I'd be nearly 100% confident that the insurer hid information.
Maybe in 1766 this principle made sense. It aint 1766 anymore.
b) In this case specifically, it would be quite hard to convince me that using publicly available information (e.g., weather reports and history of on time / delayed / cancelled flights) runs a foul of uberrima fides. You can't honestly expect me to believe the insurance company didn't have access to that information. It's equally hard for me to believe that an army of PhD actuaries didn't think to use that information to build their pricing models.
c) In the case of travel insurance, the doctrine has a really big bright-line problem. When I buy any ticket into or out of Boston during the winter months, I tend to buy travel insurance. I never buy travel insurance for flights into or out of Boston in the summer. That is clearly not fraud (or, if it is, that insurance product needs to be regulated out of existence). Now, what if I choose particular weeks? days? Where's the bright line?
d) Even supposing some obligation to share information, how in God's name am I supposed to inform the insurer that I estimate a flight will be almost surely be cancelled/delayed? Call up the 1-800 number? Because I know exactly how that would go: you'd get a first-line support person who's incentivized to sell policies. If I were running a similar scheme, I would definitely record myself calling up the insurance provider and point-blank stating "I think this flight will be cancelled, should I buy your insurance?" I guarantee the answer from the T1 support folks would be "yes, that's what it's for!". It seems totally unreasonable to assume bad faith of anyone who buys an insurance product with large positive expected value, especially when the insurance company is consistently making 10 figures in net income and is unwilling to engage in individual dialogs about "who knows what and when". If I can't get on the phone and talk to the actuary who built the pricing model to figure out if X is shared information, and if there's no list of check-boxes for me to look through in order to determine the same, and if the only company representative I can get access to is probably going to explicitly tell me to buy the policy, then... what the hell?
All of these things taken together: if I were on a jury and uberrima fides was the only reason to find in favor of the insurer, I would certainly do everything I could to sway my fellow jurors toward favoring the insured.
It seems like the right solution here is either a) more sophisticated pricing models, or b) some very clear and well-dilineated bounds on what information is/is not allowed to be used when purchasing travel insurance.
TL;DR: uberrima fides as a fuzzy legal doctrine seems... just... utterly impossible to apply to consumers. The relationship is fundamentally asymmetric, so the insurer should have a burden to explicitly ask about any relevant information (as is done for, e.g., health and life products). As a fuzzy doctrine for deciding on a case-by-case basis, this doctrine seems more relevant when the insurer and insured are more symmetric (e.g., insurance products aimed at large corporations, reinsurance, etc.).
(Of course identity fraud is a problem and this happened in China which doesn't use the same legal system, so this is all just a hypothetical conversation.)
I used to work for a company that made health insurance claims benefit management software for first and third party administrators.
We would get requests from clients to do data mining in our databases that was well in excess of what was legal - one example included the fact that they were using genealogy services to build family trees and while they couldn't mine DNA for familial information, surely there was no harm in looking over your distant relatives for diagnosis codes, right?
"We can't do that".
"Why not, it's all in the databases, right?"
To the OP's point, that would oblige the traveler to notify their insurance if they got a text from the airline advising of delays, etc.
I'm extraordinarily jaded, but I'm fairly certain that one of the points of funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning research is to side-step regulations in the finance and insurance industries.
Fortunately, in the US, laws about such things are quite strong at the moment. Stay tuned...
She had to use 20 different identities do to this. That should answer your question.