How a leading claims management company that specializes in fraud uncovered an organized fraud ring while also streamlining their process for helping their insurance customers identify fraudulent claims.
Agricultural vehicles are an attractive target for fraudsters. They are often conspicuously displayed, easy to steal and high in value. And they are costing insurance companies over £78 million a year.
Following an increase in tractor thefts in the
northwest, a large insurance company enlisted the help of Cunningham Lindsey to sort through the myriad of insurance claims coming in for agricultural vehicles to determine which claims were legitimate.
The insurance company conducted their own initial investigation and provided Cunningham Lindsey with 50 claims from the target region and their own intelligence of claimants who were possibly assisting the fraudsters. Armed with this information, Cunningham Lindsay was challenged with sorting through the data to uncover links, trends or associations that would identify the fraudsters.
Cunningham Lindsey has been using iBase to track and organize information on the thousands of claims they have investigated. This gives them a valuable database they can cross reference all new claims against to quickly identify the legitimate claims from the fraudulent ones.
In addition, by customizing the fields in iBase to key information from past fraudulent claims, they set up an alert system with iBase that notifies them anytime a new claim comes in with the same telephone number, address or customer name used in a previous fraudulent claim. These alerts help them proactively identify fraudsters, so their insurance clients are only reimbursing legitimate claims.
By customizing the fields in iBase we were able to set up a system that alerts us anytime a new claim comes in containing a fraud trigger. This enabled us to quickly determine their legitimate claims from the fraudulent ones.
Lisa Hynd, Complex Technical Services Director,
Cunningham Lindsey
With this system in place, Cunningham Lindsey was able to run their insurance client’s claims against their own database of past offences and quickly identify any possible fraudulent claims for stolen agricultural vehicles. Cunningham Lindsey then layered that intelligence on top of the information the insurance client provided on the potential co-conspirators. This revealed additional associations between their claimants and past offenders and ultimately identified a network of organized fraudsters targeting the region.
By sharing information and working together, Cunningham Lindsey helped their client identify the fraudsters and equipped the police with the evidence they needed to send them to prison, saving their client £300,000 in potential fraudulent claims.
Due to the success they have had with iBase, Cunningham Lindsey continues to work with i2 on integrating their claims system so they can protect their customers and help them identify and process their clients’ legitimate claims quickly.
Cunningham Lindsey is one of the largest loss adjusting and claims management companies in the world, with over 7,000 employees in more than 60 countries. They offer claims handling, domestic and commercial loss adjusting, catastrophe or major loss claims management assistance on a global basis.
Find out more about i2 Analyst's Notebook, iBase or contact us to see how we can help you with your fraud investigations.