Massive insurance fraud. Italians register cars in Poland

The massive fraud was reported by the Money.pl website last year - the Polish Insurance Association already emphasized that Polish drivers, whose premiums were increasing, were paying for the practice. The Financial Times is now writing about the case.

How does the procedure work?

Italian vehicle owners transfer the formal ownership of their cars to companies registered in Poland. They then register cars and motorcycles on the Vistula River, taking advantage of lower taxes and insurance premiums.

That's not all - registration in Poland also allowed you to avoid parking tickets and traffic violations. The fines went to Polish companies that often did not conduct any actual business, making their enforcement almost impossible.

Growing losses and increasing compensation

The scale of the problem is growing at an alarming rate. Only during eight months of this year, the value of compensation payments in Italy for vehicles with Polish plates reached PLN 35 million. For comparison, in the whole of 2025 it was PLN 18 million, and a year earlier - less than PLN 7 million.

The vice-president of PBUK, Piotr Zadrożny, emphasized in an interview with the Financial Times that the practice has a strong connection with organized crime. Interestingly, most of these vehicles never appeared on Polish roads.

Services on both sides of the border are springing into action

In response to the scale of the phenomenon, both Polish and Italian services launched extensive inspections. In March, the Warsaw police detained seven people suspected of falsifying registration documents for over 1.5 thousand vehicles. All cars had their permanent home in Italy and had never been to Poland.

Police in Naples are also stepping up checks on cars with foreign plates, and the government in Rome plans to introduce new requirements for motor insurance for all vehicles - including those registered abroad.