Insurance Fraud Investigators Using Social Media To Catch The Crooks

There are many different kinds of insurance fraud scams, from the creative and complicated to the simple and childlike.  Insurance fraud in the United States costs insurers about $30 billion per year; more than 10% of all losses paid out by insurance companies.  I’ve mentioned this number to people in the past who have responded with a comment that the insurance companies can afford it so what is the big deal.  But they are forgetting that all costs are passed to the consumer eventually so these crooks are really stealing from them.  Just imagine, if we could get rid of insurance fraud completely, you could expect to pay 10% less for every kind of insurance policy that you buy from auto insurance and home insurance to business insurance and life insurance and health insurance.  How much would that 10% add up to in your case?

Before social media exploded into an integral part of so many peoples’ lives, solving insurance fraud claims had been a slow and difficult process.  But sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and others are providing a wealth of information and clues to investigators.  Here are a  few of these real world examples that show how these social media sites are helping investigators catch and stop some of the insurance fraud taking place today.

This first example is a case of fraud that didn’t include an insurance company, but it does prove how powerful these tools can be.  A woman worked in the payables department of a big corporation that had awarded a maintenance contract to a firm which was secretly run by her husband.    The maintenance firm was billing for services that were not actually performed and the wife was paying them on behalf of the corporation.  You can imagine that this kind of fraud is tough to detect and even harder to prove.    But the investigator cross referenced information from all of the social media sites with traditional sources such as the white pages and eventually found an address associated with the maintenance firm that matched an address of one of the couple’s grown children.    This allowed the investigator to connect the two and eventually to put an end to their fraud.

The one area of insurance that has perhaps benefited the most from these new tools is workers compensation insurance.  In one case, an injured worker, who was out of work on disability, posted photos of himself on top of a mountain in Aspen ready to ski down.  Another disabled worker left social media tracks that led to him playing basketball in an adult basketball league.   In this case,  the insurance company saves a lot of investigation money because instead of having to follow him around 24/7, the investigator needs only to attend the basketball game to witness him playing.   Or consider the case of a worker who was out on disability for a back injury who posted photos of himself at a karate class, thereby ending his disability workers compensation claim.

Social media is also quite good at revealing relationships between the different players in a scam.    A doctor and an attorney who were involved in a fraudulent insurance scheme together turned out to be connected on Linked In and it was later found that they were tweeting to each other to set up meetings to work out their next moves.  In another case, an investigator of a slip and fall claim, using social media sleuthing, discovered that two other people living in the same apartment with the victim were also victims of previous slip and fall claims.  In the end it was proven that only the first of these claims was legitimate and that the other two were fabricated.

Even Craigslist is a useful tool for the fraud investigator.  One fraudster filed an auto insurance claim for a stolen car.  A few months later he listed that same car for sale on Craigslist.    In another example, an individual filed a claim for his car that had been burned and investigators later found several earlier ads on Craigslist where this person had tried unsuccessfully to sell the car.  I guess he decided it would be easier to burn it and collect the insurance money.

All of these sleuthing techniques will help keep your insurance costs lower over the long term.   But if you don’t want to wait for these techniques to trickle down as savings to you, but would rather lower your insurance costs today, then you should call Clinard Insurance Group, toll free, at 877-687-7557 and let us help you find the policy that suits your needs at a rates that will bring a smile to your face.