Following an investigation by officers at the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED), Tracey Miller, 42, of Cop Road, Oldham was sentenced at Burnley Crown Court last week after she pleaded guilty to stealing customer information from Aviva’s third party care team database and then selling it.

Ms Miller told police that she was first approached by a man she did not know when leaving work in 2013. She supplied the man with data between May to August 2013 and received £4,500 in payments.

In December 2013 she took voluntary redundancy from Aviva. City of London Police say that based on information initially provided by Aviva in Feb 2014, IFED launched an investigation into a man offering bribes to insurance staff for data.

An arrest warrant took place at an address on 5 November 2015 where a hard drive was discovered which contained a significant amount of accident data.  Aviva’s investigation manager identified that 2.5 percent of the recovered data that IFED had asked them to analyse was their own, and further investigation found that Ms Miller was the sole person who had accessed all of the data on the file.

Officers arrested her on 22 March 2016 at an address in Oldham for offences of bribery. When interviewed, she admitted that she had sent data and had received money for doing so.

City of London Police’s Detective Sergeant Matt Hussey, who led the investigation, said: “Miller abused her position of trust within her organisation and instead of doing the right thing and alerting her employer about being approached by a fraudster, she instead greedily decided to set-up a deal with him.

“By working closely with Aviva and their investigations team, we have been able to ensure that Miller has been brought to justice and that she will be very unlikely to ever be able to work in the insurance industry again.”

An Aviva spokesperson said: "Aviva has a zero-tolerance attitude towards data theft, and we will work tirelessly with the police, the ICO and others to bring to justice those that commit a crime by stealing our customers' data.

“However, until the financial incentives at the heart of the injury claims process are removed, consumers and their insurers will continue to be targets for those who seek to profit from accident claims.”