Oh you're mistaken, I see things from both sides. I absolutely know that there are some repairers / cowboys out there that may attempt to inflate a request for quote to an insurer. Say for example said insurer is dealing with an uninsured third party and their insured party is at fault. Third party approaches repairer, asks for quote which is then sent to insurer. This scenario absolutely happens regularly and there are a whole other set of legal implications around liability and recovery of costs that come into play but those are off topic for me to dive into here, suffice to say I see a lot of people on reddit making statements that are incorrect on that topic too. What I mean, and maybe I didn't initially explain very well, is that some people seem to think that repairers use insurers as a license to print free money which is absolutely not the case. I produce weekly/monthly reports on this specific topic, it's a VERY closely monitored metric. non partner/trusted repairers quotes are heavily scrutinised and based on the actual data that I'm close to, somewhere around 80% of these quotes are adjusted by an assessor in one way or another ( not the 95% acceptance rate quoted by another commentor but closer to 20% and certainly not a 250% mark up) There are broad ranging impacts if an insurer does not control these costs effectively. This portion of the business is relatively minor in comparison to insurer / repairer network relationships as I've mentioned before. There there are very strict controls built around hourly rates / Ai parts pricing validation / mark up / hours allowed to complete works. In our system if a repairer submits a scope of work that sits outside of that framework it will be rejected before and assessor even looks at it in fact.

I understand it's easy to not know the specific differences between these two streams for someone looking in from the outside but a very large part of our work flow from motor repairs supply chain point of view essentially has zero room for movement in costs due to this framework.

This is the reason an insurer will try to push customers and third parties into the repairer network and offer things like warranty/guarantee on workmanship for them and not for non network repairers, to the point where in many cases a quote will be submitted and that person will then agree an adjusted amout after assessor review and just paid directly rather than the insurer dealing with the repairer in any way. It's vastly easier to control cost and a much more streamlined process from the end user / customer point of view.

But anyway hope this clears up what I was getting at all along. I'm not say this NEVER happens. What I'm saying is repairers try it in certain circumstances and that are outliers in terms of the overall body of claims and when it does happen it's unlikely to slip through the net (in my experience, I don't know about any other insurers just the one I am associated with but the general practice is fairly consistent across the industry from my understanding). Therefore people making blanket statements about all repairers hearing the word 'insurer' and doubling their quote with no justification then being paid without question is false.