An insurer is offering its customers troll insurance. The “cyberbulling cover” will pay out only in specific circumstances.

The cover is from the UK wing of the Chubb insurance group. It won’t be a standalone policy but instead will be available as part of personal (householder) insurance policies renewed after January 1st.

To qualify for a payout, the policyholder will need to have been the victim of three attempts to “harass, threaten or intimidate” carried out by the same individual or group. How easy that will be to prove, and how Chubb will go about verifying such a claim, remains to be seen.

One obvious problem is that the threshold of proving who is responsible for the attacks will need to be fairly high to avoid the risk of a fraudulent customer setting up three “anonymous” attacks to set up a claim.

The policy will pay out a maximum of £50,000 (approx US$75,000) for a variety of purposes. These include counselling, lost income through missing time at work or losing a job through stress, and the costs of relocating if the trolls threaten personal safety.

The insurer will also provide access to public relations services to counter online allegations, along with cybersecurity experts to help track down the trolls.

According to the insurer, offering a cyberbullying policy is a modern take on the principle of insurance helping a customer get back to the position they were in before a incident, something that can include emotional as well as physical losses and damages.

[Via Makeuseof]