Purpose – The idea of customer orientation is widely recognized by service people. However, there has been a lack of investigation into how the recognition of customer orientation may affect the service people’s attitudes toward customer misconducts. As a result, our knowledge about the potential impacts of customer orientation philosophy on the ethical decisions made by service people could be insufficient. Hence, by using the life insurance salespeople in Taiwan as an example, the purpose of this paper is to investigate service people’s tolerance of two types of customer misconduct (opportunistic frauds and planned frauds) and how those service people would react to the customer misconduct based on their marketing philosophy (customer orientation), perceived fraud size and perceived social consensus. Design/methodology/approach – The sample of this study comes from life insurance companies in Taiwan. Questionnaires have been used as a data gathering instrument. Findings – The results showed that customer orientation of the responders is negatively associated with the responders’ tolerance of the customer claim frauds. The responders’ unethical decision is most significantly influenced by perceived fraud size and social consensus. Originality/value – The duties of insurance salespeople include helping customers settle insurance claims. However, insurance salespeople’s tolerance of customer claim frauds is less mentioned in the insurance literature. Few studies have examined the relationship among customer orientation, social consensus and insurance salespeople’s tolerance of customer claim frauds.