Italská Neapol je na úplném vrcholu，当 it comes to expensive mandatory liability insurance – while the cheapest Italian provinces charge around 180 euros, Neapolitans pay a staggering 555 euros per year. This enormous price gap sparked a phenomenon locals call „neapolský podvod“ – the Neapolitan fraud. The scheme is deceptively simple: a car or scooter is deregistered from Italian records, formally acquired by a Polish company, insured in Poland with cheap mandatory liability coverage, and then rented back to the same person who drives it in Naples every single day. Everything stays exactly where it was, only the ownership papers, license plates, and insurance policy change. In some cases, the entire operation was purely paper-based – Italian financial police even found a shipment of over 20 Polish license plates with vehicle documents, some of which had never physically visited Poland at all.
Poland, however, has now discovered the true cost of this arrangement. According to data from the Polish insurance office PBUK, drivers with Polish-plated vehicles caused over 11,000 foreign damage claims in Italy alone in 2025. Even more alarming, damages caused by uninsured Polish-registered vehicles more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, jumping from 1,574 to 3,188 cases, with PBUK paying out 41.7 million zlotys. Italian damages now account for 44% of all PBUK payouts related to uninsured foreign vehicles, and the number of Italian claims has grown seventeenfold between 2021 and 2025. The Polish insurance association openly warns that the „Italian practice“ ultimately hits honest Polish clients – when insurers price Polish risk but receive Neapolitan damage data, the math catches up and the bill lands on those who never left Poland.
Now the trend is crossing borders into the Czech Republic, where companies like PROCARPATIA s.r.o. have begun renting scooters branded with Czech plates in the Naples area. Czech authorities present a higher barrier than Poland – mandatory vehicle inspection and evidence checks during registration make purely paper-based registration significantly harder. Nevertheless, Czech insurers are already spotting suspicious patterns: large numbers of vehicles under single owners, similar scooter types, and registrations concentrated in the same locations. Some companies are terminating suspicious contracts or refusing new ones altogether. The core message is clear: a scooter with a Czech license plate that actually spends every day circling Naples represents a completely different risk profile than one parked in Olomouc. If insurers fail to detect and properly price this shifted risk, the costs will eventually be passed on to every honest Czech policyholder – and that is exactly the lesson neighboring Poland is still learning.
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