Heard the one about the mobile phone and the cow?

Neither had the insurance assessors until someone submitted a claim for a phone lost by a farmer who was using the torch function to help him deliver a calf.

Britain's Daily Mail newspaper reports that website mobileinsurance has listed some of the most far-fetched claims it has received in the past 12 months.

Other claims detail events as bizarre as phones being baked into cakes and flushed down toilets and then there was a couple on a cruise who lost their phone overboard while trying to recreate a scene from the movie Titanic at the bow of the vessel.

A woman in her 20s claimed for a phone destroyed when it hit a wall after she threw it at her cheating boyfriend.

John Lamerton, the insurer's managing director told the Daily Mail: "Judging by these claims, you really never know what you might need to claim for. My advice would be to just use the phone as a phone."

Top ten crazy claims

1. Lost inside a cow

2. Baked into a cake

3. Flushed down a lavatory

4. Snatched by a seagull

5. Blasted by fireworks

6. Stolen by monkeys

7. Dropped from a tree

8. Thrown at a boyfriend

9. Worn out by 'intimate' use