It's an interesting article, but the title ('we found fraud!') doesn't quite match the article, which continually points out that there are suspicious patterns in the data but that they aren't ironclad evidence of fraud.
That said ... yeah those particular VINs do look seriously dodgy to me! If nothing else, then the drivers reporting 5 crashes in a 12 month window probably shouldn't be driving.
I was in the left lane, stopped, signaling to make a left turn, when someone rear ended me because they didn't notice me.
I was stopped at a red light. The octogenarian behind me revved his engine, dropped into drive, and peeled out to rear end me a second time, because he “had places to be”. When I asked for his insurance, he drove off and I had to file a hit-and-run report with the police.
Just saying, sometimes you can be minding your own business and get really unlucky.
After reading the comments, I’d like to clarify a few things. This article isn’t meant to pitch a fraud scoring product. I recently discovered that several states publish VIN level data and, as a weekend project, decided to dig a bit deeper to see what I could learn. Given more time, I’d refine the analysis by normalizing against registration volumes, flagging outliers, and so on but for now I simply want to share an interesting glimpse at what ive found.
I don't see nearly enough complexity in this analysis to justify the claim of having found any insurance fraud.
Firstly, there's no account for correlation between the features identified. The article mentions VINs which have several single-vehicle accidents, for example, but someone who has one single-vehicle accident is probably more likely to have another. Switching coverage is another of those potentially-correlated features; if you claim and it bumps your premium, aren't you likely to shop around as a result?
Secondly, there's no attempt to account for the law of large numbers. It's incredibly unlikely that someone has three single vehicle accidents in a year, but because the probability of that is nonzero, we know that with enough vehicles on the road then someone is going to do it.
The article covers itself by acknowledging this, of course, but if you title your blog post "We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data" then you should actually do that.
Also, anyone who lives in an area where there are deer (or, kangaroos in australia) will tell you - strange sounding single car crashes late at night or early in the morning.. aren't that strange, that's when the deer (or kangaroos) are out and about. Where I grew up if someone had hit a kangaroo 3 times in a year it would be strange sounding for sure, but not that strange.
My Mother got a letter saying "if you hit another deer we will cancel your insurance", because she hit 3 deer in one year. Those 3 are the only deer she has hit in > 60 years of driving. Random events cluster.
This is a marketing blog for some AI startup trying to sell AI voodoo to the insurance industry, so it just needs to sound like it might be useful for finding fraud.
> The article mentions VINs which have several single-vehicle accidents, for example, but someone who has one single-vehicle accident is probably more likely to have another.
I haven't followed this story to know whether she's still driving, but one driver was involved in 7 crashes in 4 years, including two fatalities.
>Anderson received the maximum sentence by Judge Charles Miller of three years, laid out in the plea agreement.
>Under the plea agreement, Anderson’s license will be suspended for six years, the maximum under a Level 5 felony, and she will also be named a habitual traffic offender, which will suspend her license for 10 years. The license suspensions will run concurrently.
Now it's time for the devil's advocate-- if the title was "some people get in a lot of accidents", would the top comment be "actually it's more likely that insurance fraud is the answer"
That doesn't really matter. I mean, sure, I could look at this data and say "hmm, looks like insurance fraud to me."
But the point being, I really don't have evidence one way or the other. Implying insurance fraud is saying you think a criminal act occurred, and when you say something like that the burden should be on you to provide some evidence to that effect.
Random internet commenters bullshit all the time. But this blog post provides specific data and an unambiguous conclusion that fraud occurred (the title does not hedge, it is "We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data"), so if you do something like that you need to provide evidence for it. I appreciate the parent commenter for pointing out that, despite all of their data, they didn't really provide much evidence for their conclusion.
Exactly this. When I open a post like this I get excited because I think I'm either about to learn something interesting about data analysis, or I'm about to see a neat application of a technique that I already know about and it's going to make me happy.
When the post actually boils down to "hey if you look at a large dataset then you'll find unusual events in it, now visit our AI startup!" then that irritates me enough to whine about it in the comments.
i have absolutely no problem with that, i suspect that no matter the title, whoever has a contrarian opinion to it will be the one to speak up while the rest remain silent
The conclusion is a little too strong for my tastes. Changing coverage looks sketchy, but I’d bet people shop around after a crash and the ensuing rate hike.
Being involved in multiple accidents could suggest fraud but it could also just be bad driving, maybe someone very young or old.
It’d really help to know the base rates for many of these things: how often do people switch insurance, for example?
> Some years ago, a police officer casually told me, “You should get a dashcam, insurance fraud is common around here.” His offhand comment stuck with me, but life moved on.
This is very, very good advice. Dashcams are cheap, and easy to install. Treat yourself - spending $80 on a camera could save you thousands in lawsuits, insurance hikes, costs of a new car, etc.
To me it seems nearly as important as having a smoke detector in your house.
I don't remember them being easy to install; you need mounts and in the case of a rear dashcam, someone to wire them into your rear seat. Car dealerships should advertise adding webcams while you're in there -- that would really make it easy.
Cars should just give you access to the cameras that are already there. Why get a rear facing camera when your car is already legally required to have one?
I've wondered this too. Even if it's only the rear camera all cars should have a few seconds of rolling buffer that they save whenever an accident is detected. At the very least if the airbags blow it should trigger the save. You only need enough storage for maybe 10-15 seconds of footage.
I would also like the ability to turn on the rear camera when moving forward, for those times when the rear view mirror is blocked, especially on vehicles where the backup camera is integrated into the rear view mirror.
I got a dashcam that ran off USB, which I knew my car had a port for on the center console. There's ways to run the wire under the trim for the most part, but it's a long run.. and at the end there's a part that remains visible to some degree.
There are cams that can do a rear view as well from inside the cab, which likely provides enough evidence if you're rear ended.
I only opted for a forward facing dash cam.
In my state, you are 100% at fault for rear ending someone unless you can prove your innocence -- which a dashcam can do assuming the person in front does something shady (like lane change + intentionally slam breaks).
However, do note that dash cams are not going to magically make rear ending the person in front of you somehow that person's fault. Virtually no one seems to leave enough follow distance by default because doing so means someone merged into the space.. and a dash cam doesn't shift the blame for simple rear endings unless it can prove some kind of malice or inattentiveness on the other driver (but even then, inattentiveness of the other driver is not necessarily a legal defense for you not leaving enough room to react.. perhaps if they stopped faster than a car could be expected to break, e.g. hit a concrete wall....) -- of course, laws vary by state
In my car taking the headliner off involves removing 6 bolts (one in each pillar) and then popping out some retaining clips. I was surprised at how easy it was when I ran the wire to the rear camera. Headliners were notoriously difficult to deal with in the old days. There was even space to tuck the excess wire away to keep it neat and tidy looking. My camera just sticks to the glass using a sticker so attaching it was no problem either.
The camera I bought came with everything I needed, including cables that let me wire it into the circuit breaker panel so it could run even when the engine is off. (It didn't work, but that was probably my fault.)
Installation was easy - glue a thing to the windshield & rear windshield, & run the wires to the cigarette lighter USB adapter (which was also included). It was a bit of a pain to tuck the wires into the trim around the doors, but overall, not bad.
But yes, it would have been easier to have a dealership install one for me.
I mean, they also charge you $150 to change the oil when you can do it yourself at home for free - it's a matter of whether you have more time, or more money.
I had an incident where an older couple were stopped at a green light, angled down hill, in a snowstorm, with parking brake instead of foot pedal, in a borrowed vehicle.
When they asked me for insurance I just dragged it out and made friendly conversation(eventually giving the insurance slip). They got increasingly irate and panicked. Maybe because it was only a glancing blow and wouldn’t exceed even a slim deductible.
If you rear-end someone, it's pretty much always your fault. People are allowed to be stopped in the road for any number of reasons, and it's your responsibility as a car operator to be aware of your surroundings and able to stop your own car without hitting anything.
This story doesn't make sense: it's not clear who hit who, whether you were scamming them by not giving insurance, or how a dash cam would help when no real damage was done.
The older couple hit him, with their motionless, parking-braked vehicle. Possibly by using dark matter/energy to cause space-time expansion that pushed his car into theirs.
Snow storm detail indicates the road may have been slippery. They might have locked their wheels on an icy hill and skated into the other car. It happens a lot where I live.
Driving defensively and slowly is much more skin to having a smoke detector as it actually aims at preventing harm rather than just figuring out who’s at fault.
The typical fraud "accident" is a vehicle with 4-5 people (including a child) who slam on their brakes in heavy traffic on the freeway. If that doesn't work, they reverse into you, and then claim whiplash for all the people in the car with a doctor who has everything to gain. It's $50k minimum.
If someone backs into you, or slams on their breaks on the freeway without reason you can drive as defensively as you want and still get unlucky. People can cause "accidents" much more effectively than you can avoid one. Careful motorcyclists know that watching the behavior of all the people around them is critical to survival, but they still get into collisions.
If you do try to drive so "defensively" that you can never get into an accident another person tries to cause, then you end up with 7-10 car lengths of separation, and people will regularly cut you off increasing risks. Please don't be that guy stopped 70ft back from the traffic light and stopping on on-ramps.
Also fun to see dashcam video where someone jumps out in front of the car for the insurance claim, but the driver is too alert and stops before hitting them, only for the person to then throw themselves on the hood of the car while their friend pretends to freak out on the sidewalk and call the cops.
Before I had a dash cam, I had somebody at a stop sign just throw it in reverse and back right into me. I thought I was completely fucked, that they were going to say that I rear-ended them and I would have no recourse.
Luckily for me, they just gassed it and took off. They lost me at a roundabout when I had to wait for a box truck to go by in the night.
I now have a dash cam. No amount of defensive driving would have saved me if they were fraudsters.
Well they do say they calculate propensity scores, but the whole language of the blog post is very hand-wavy. Warning over and over again that something is not causal proof, and then dramaticizing it as if it were proof is just unprofessional.
If you have a fraud model, just show the model and the data and the validation - everything else is marketing fluff.
It’s very unfortunate that the worst people in society ruin insurance for everyone else - so that when you need to use it you are investigated as a criminal. Too many systems are being broken by a tiny minority of people with no skin in the game and no social consciousness.
As others have pointed out VIN as your primary level of detail is fairly flawed. You should also be filtering on vehicle registrations. A possible scenario here is someone owns their car, gets into an accident, repairs it or sells it off (insurance sell off). Someone else buys it gets difference insurance, and has an accident because its a new car to them. You would never know this vehicle story without integrating the registration history or at least buy and sell dates to know it has exchanged hands.
Yes Fraud is tricky, but a VIN does not equal a person (PII) committing the behavior, and these poor association attempts leave innocent people screwed by insurance companies. What makes this bad analysis annoying, is the constant caveats, if you know VIN associations don't prove fraud then maybe don't build some sort of risk scoring on it, and then try an sell it.
1. Drink/drugs impair your judgment, making you more likely to commit fraud if you were on the fence, or the impulsive sort.
2. Drunk drivers get into multiple accidents, but some are able to keep evidence of impairment off the record (buddy on the force or the insurance co, etc.)
3. Drivers doing drugs that aren't detectable on the spot, and clear the body quickly, reducing evidence of drug use in crashes.
4. More people are likely to do drink/drugs at night, so if 1-3 are true, we should expect to see more crashes at night. Likewise for a lack of witnesses (fewer passengers or bystanders).
Most importantly, statistics are completely absent from the article. Does OP have any evidence these numbers wouldn't fit the correct random distribution? I know the point of fraud is to appear natural, but if done well, that means evidence has to be collected by other means, and this kind of analysis is only a weak signal.
I read that as assuming the fraudsters were professionals in a sense, i.e. doing it in an organized way.
Wouldn't those kinds of criminals try to keep it looking clean?
I'm a little skeptical, it would be interesting to add odometer data, time of day, and distance from home. My driving is on low end of the collision risk spectrum because I don't drive much, mostly day time, and mostly routes that I've driven hundreds or thousands of times and where know the lines of sight and cadence of traffic. On the other hand I would expect more risk for someone who worked night shifts, did taxi or delivery type driving where they're often in unfamiliar areas, or just plain put in more miles. I would expect these effects to create a wide collision frequency spread even holding constant skill and good intentions.
>After filtering out invalid VINs, we narrowed the dataset to roughly ~15 million crashes. (We also removed all drug and alcohol related crashes, since it’s unlikely someone committing insurance fraud would be under the influence.)
Which I immediately found extremely implausible. Seems like the author is very much NOT familiar with the type of people who commit insurance fraud.
In the next paragraph the article links to the FBI website on the fraud ring in Connecticut.
>After an autumn evening of drinking and using drugs in 2013, a group of friends got into an Audi A6 and drove to the remote Wilderness Road in Norwich, Connecticut. The car slid off the road, hitting a tree.
>Everyone in the car survived, but this seemingly typical crash was no accident.
>Despite their impairment, the driver and passengers had purposely planned the crash to collect the insurance money.
So yeah, don't exclude drug/alcohol related crashes. Also the author should read the first fucking sentence of the stuff they link. It's only six words in!
Yeah. I'm not a fraud expert, but "impaired judgement" is a common effect of alcohol, and "desperation" is a common effect of drug addiction, so it seems weird to assume that people using drugs are committing fraud at a lower rate than the overall population rate.
As a side note, I grew up in Norwich so it's funny to see it mentioned in that report as "remote" because there isn't really anything remote in Norwich. Wilderness Rd, despite its name, does a ring around Mohegan Park, which is an urban-ish park with some trees and a rose garden. You can walk to the rose garden from the high school, which I sometimes did. Anyway.
I expected this to be about data found in the memory dump of a crashed process. (And was surprised they would post about this at all, given privacy issues.)
> we never expected that a side by side look at Vehicle Identification Numbers and crash timelines would hint at possible insurance fraud.
Uh... I'm not surprised at all that auto insurance fraud, which involves vehicle collisions, might show up in vehicle collision data. This is sensationalist crap.
It's an interesting article, but the title ('we found fraud!') doesn't quite match the article, which continually points out that there are suspicious patterns in the data but that they aren't ironclad evidence of fraud.
That said ... yeah those particular VINs do look seriously dodgy to me! If nothing else, then the drivers reporting 5 crashes in a 12 month window probably shouldn't be driving.
I got into 2 crashes in a couple of weeks once:
I was in the left lane, stopped, signaling to make a left turn, when someone rear ended me because they didn't notice me.
I was stopped at a red light. The octogenarian behind me revved his engine, dropped into drive, and peeled out to rear end me a second time, because he “had places to be”. When I asked for his insurance, he drove off and I had to file a hit-and-run report with the police.
Just saying, sometimes you can be minding your own business and get really unlucky.
After reading the comments, I’d like to clarify a few things. This article isn’t meant to pitch a fraud scoring product. I recently discovered that several states publish VIN level data and, as a weekend project, decided to dig a bit deeper to see what I could learn. Given more time, I’d refine the analysis by normalizing against registration volumes, flagging outliers, and so on but for now I simply want to share an interesting glimpse at what ive found.
I don't see nearly enough complexity in this analysis to justify the claim of having found any insurance fraud.
Firstly, there's no account for correlation between the features identified. The article mentions VINs which have several single-vehicle accidents, for example, but someone who has one single-vehicle accident is probably more likely to have another. Switching coverage is another of those potentially-correlated features; if you claim and it bumps your premium, aren't you likely to shop around as a result?
Secondly, there's no attempt to account for the law of large numbers. It's incredibly unlikely that someone has three single vehicle accidents in a year, but because the probability of that is nonzero, we know that with enough vehicles on the road then someone is going to do it.
The article covers itself by acknowledging this, of course, but if you title your blog post "We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data" then you should actually do that.
Also, anyone who lives in an area where there are deer (or, kangaroos in australia) will tell you - strange sounding single car crashes late at night or early in the morning.. aren't that strange, that's when the deer (or kangaroos) are out and about. Where I grew up if someone had hit a kangaroo 3 times in a year it would be strange sounding for sure, but not that strange.
My Mother got a letter saying "if you hit another deer we will cancel your insurance", because she hit 3 deer in one year. Those 3 are the only deer she has hit in > 60 years of driving. Random events cluster.
This is a marketing blog for some AI startup trying to sell AI voodoo to the insurance industry, so it just needs to sound like it might be useful for finding fraud.
> The article mentions VINs which have several single-vehicle accidents, for example, but someone who has one single-vehicle accident is probably more likely to have another.
I haven't followed this story to know whether she's still driving, but one driver was involved in 7 crashes in 4 years, including two fatalities.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2022/06/17/car-cra...
Looks like she got three years in jail and a 10 year suspension of her license.
https://fox59.com/news/indycrime/indy-woman-to-serve-3-years...
>Anderson received the maximum sentence by Judge Charles Miller of three years, laid out in the plea agreement.
>Under the plea agreement, Anderson’s license will be suspended for six years, the maximum under a Level 5 felony, and she will also be named a habitual traffic offender, which will suspend her license for 10 years. The license suspensions will run concurrently.
Totally agree.
yes agree, kinda clickbaity
title: "we found insurance fraud in our crash data"
end of post: "Does this prove fraud? Absolutely not."
lmao
Now it's time for the devil's advocate-- if the title was "some people get in a lot of accidents", would the top comment be "actually it's more likely that insurance fraud is the answer"
That doesn't really matter. I mean, sure, I could look at this data and say "hmm, looks like insurance fraud to me."
But the point being, I really don't have evidence one way or the other. Implying insurance fraud is saying you think a criminal act occurred, and when you say something like that the burden should be on you to provide some evidence to that effect.
Random internet commenters bullshit all the time. But this blog post provides specific data and an unambiguous conclusion that fraud occurred (the title does not hedge, it is "We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data"), so if you do something like that you need to provide evidence for it. I appreciate the parent commenter for pointing out that, despite all of their data, they didn't really provide much evidence for their conclusion.
Exactly this. When I open a post like this I get excited because I think I'm either about to learn something interesting about data analysis, or I'm about to see a neat application of a technique that I already know about and it's going to make me happy.
When the post actually boils down to "hey if you look at a large dataset then you'll find unusual events in it, now visit our AI startup!" then that irritates me enough to whine about it in the comments.
No, because insurance fraud is vastly less likely.
It's the same reason I don't assume memory bits flipped by solar radiation are the most likely cause of my bugs.
These are not symmetrical claims.
For what it's worth, the headline here does NOT say "we find it more likely than not that there is evidence of insurance fraud in our crash data".
i have absolutely no problem with that, i suspect that no matter the title, whoever has a contrarian opinion to it will be the one to speak up while the rest remain silent
The conclusion is a little too strong for my tastes. Changing coverage looks sketchy, but I’d bet people shop around after a crash and the ensuing rate hike.
Being involved in multiple accidents could suggest fraud but it could also just be bad driving, maybe someone very young or old.
It’d really help to know the base rates for many of these things: how often do people switch insurance, for example?
> Some years ago, a police officer casually told me, “You should get a dashcam, insurance fraud is common around here.” His offhand comment stuck with me, but life moved on.
This is very, very good advice. Dashcams are cheap, and easy to install. Treat yourself - spending $80 on a camera could save you thousands in lawsuits, insurance hikes, costs of a new car, etc.
To me it seems nearly as important as having a smoke detector in your house.
I don't remember them being easy to install; you need mounts and in the case of a rear dashcam, someone to wire them into your rear seat. Car dealerships should advertise adding webcams while you're in there -- that would really make it easy.
Cars should just give you access to the cameras that are already there. Why get a rear facing camera when your car is already legally required to have one?
I've wondered this too. Even if it's only the rear camera all cars should have a few seconds of rolling buffer that they save whenever an accident is detected. At the very least if the airbags blow it should trigger the save. You only need enough storage for maybe 10-15 seconds of footage.
I would also like the ability to turn on the rear camera when moving forward, for those times when the rear view mirror is blocked, especially on vehicles where the backup camera is integrated into the rear view mirror.
Cars aren't legally required to have a rear-facing camera. New cars are. My 2008 Infiniti doesn't have one, for example.
I got a dashcam that ran off USB, which I knew my car had a port for on the center console. There's ways to run the wire under the trim for the most part, but it's a long run.. and at the end there's a part that remains visible to some degree.
There are cams that can do a rear view as well from inside the cab, which likely provides enough evidence if you're rear ended.
I only opted for a forward facing dash cam.
In my state, you are 100% at fault for rear ending someone unless you can prove your innocence -- which a dashcam can do assuming the person in front does something shady (like lane change + intentionally slam breaks).
However, do note that dash cams are not going to magically make rear ending the person in front of you somehow that person's fault. Virtually no one seems to leave enough follow distance by default because doing so means someone merged into the space.. and a dash cam doesn't shift the blame for simple rear endings unless it can prove some kind of malice or inattentiveness on the other driver (but even then, inattentiveness of the other driver is not necessarily a legal defense for you not leaving enough room to react.. perhaps if they stopped faster than a car could be expected to break, e.g. hit a concrete wall....) -- of course, laws vary by state
You tuck the wire along the headliner with an interior tool. It's about 10 minutes of work.
In some cars. You're making me think of my van where installing a radio involves unbolting and lowering the steering column. :)
In my car taking the headliner off involves removing 6 bolts (one in each pillar) and then popping out some retaining clips. I was surprised at how easy it was when I ran the wire to the rear camera. Headliners were notoriously difficult to deal with in the old days. There was even space to tuck the excess wire away to keep it neat and tidy looking. My camera just sticks to the glass using a sticker so attaching it was no problem either.
The camera I bought came with everything I needed, including cables that let me wire it into the circuit breaker panel so it could run even when the engine is off. (It didn't work, but that was probably my fault.)
Installation was easy - glue a thing to the windshield & rear windshield, & run the wires to the cigarette lighter USB adapter (which was also included). It was a bit of a pain to tuck the wires into the trim around the doors, but overall, not bad.
But yes, it would have been easier to have a dealership install one for me.
They are a big fat pain. I just added a front-facing one, done the right way (into the fusebox).
Didn't bother with the rear-facing one.
>Car dealerships should advertise adding webcams while you're in there -- that would really make it easy.
And probably charge you $1000 to install a $100 dashcam.
I mean, they also charge you $150 to change the oil when you can do it yourself at home for free - it's a matter of whether you have more time, or more money.
"This is very, very good advice. Dashcams are cheap, and easy to install."
An excellent example of the absolutely awful behavior that can be encountered on the road:
https://www.reddit.com/r/scammers/comments/1g6xcng/attempt_t...
I had an incident where an older couple were stopped at a green light, angled down hill, in a snowstorm, with parking brake instead of foot pedal, in a borrowed vehicle.
When they asked me for insurance I just dragged it out and made friendly conversation(eventually giving the insurance slip). They got increasingly irate and panicked. Maybe because it was only a glancing blow and wouldn’t exceed even a slim deductible.
Anyway, I should probably get a dash cam…
If you rear-end someone, it's pretty much always your fault. People are allowed to be stopped in the road for any number of reasons, and it's your responsibility as a car operator to be aware of your surroundings and able to stop your own car without hitting anything.
This story doesn't make sense: it's not clear who hit who, whether you were scamming them by not giving insurance, or how a dash cam would help when no real damage was done.
The older couple hit him, with their motionless, parking-braked vehicle. Possibly by using dark matter/energy to cause space-time expansion that pushed his car into theirs.
Snow storm detail indicates the road may have been slippery. They might have locked their wheels on an icy hill and skated into the other car. It happens a lot where I live.
I don't really understand what you're trying to say here.
Did you try to avoid giving them your insurance details? Why?
What would the dash cam have shown?
I would find it weird too if someone would stall.
And you always need to be able to stop your car independently of the other do. You know minimum braking distance?
Driving defensively and slowly is much more skin to having a smoke detector as it actually aims at preventing harm rather than just figuring out who’s at fault.
The typical fraud "accident" is a vehicle with 4-5 people (including a child) who slam on their brakes in heavy traffic on the freeway. If that doesn't work, they reverse into you, and then claim whiplash for all the people in the car with a doctor who has everything to gain. It's $50k minimum.
If someone backs into you, or slams on their breaks on the freeway without reason you can drive as defensively as you want and still get unlucky. People can cause "accidents" much more effectively than you can avoid one. Careful motorcyclists know that watching the behavior of all the people around them is critical to survival, but they still get into collisions.
If you do try to drive so "defensively" that you can never get into an accident another person tries to cause, then you end up with 7-10 car lengths of separation, and people will regularly cut you off increasing risks. Please don't be that guy stopped 70ft back from the traffic light and stopping on on-ramps.
Also fun to see dashcam video where someone jumps out in front of the car for the insurance claim, but the driver is too alert and stops before hitting them, only for the person to then throw themselves on the hood of the car while their friend pretends to freak out on the sidewalk and call the cops.
Honestly, car insurance fraud is one of my favorite guilty pleasures on the short-video apps.
Getting falsely accused of hitting someone, being sued, and seeing a huge insurance rate hike doesn't count as harm?
Before I had a dash cam, I had somebody at a stop sign just throw it in reverse and back right into me. I thought I was completely fucked, that they were going to say that I rear-ended them and I would have no recourse.
Luckily for me, they just gassed it and took off. They lost me at a roundabout when I had to wait for a box truck to go by in the night.
I now have a dash cam. No amount of defensive driving would have saved me if they were fraudsters.
I suppose the broken metaphor would be "I don't deep fry turkeys in my living room and I have smoke detectors."
But what you're saying ignores the fact that you're not the only turkey on the road.
I'm kind of irritated that the article doesn't say anything about probabilities.
Given they have enough data, at some point it's perfectly reasonable to have cars with 5+ crashes per 12 months - just because of chance.
This is exactly why statistics was invented, damnit!
I think “in the exact same way with all the known indicators of insurance fraud” adds a couple orders of magnitude to the expected by-chance odds.
Well they do say they calculate propensity scores, but the whole language of the blog post is very hand-wavy. Warning over and over again that something is not causal proof, and then dramaticizing it as if it were proof is just unprofessional.
If you have a fraud model, just show the model and the data and the validation - everything else is marketing fluff.
It’s very unfortunate that the worst people in society ruin insurance for everyone else - so that when you need to use it you are investigated as a criminal. Too many systems are being broken by a tiny minority of people with no skin in the game and no social consciousness.
Almost everything wrong in society can be traced back to some small percentage of people ruining it for everyone else.
As others have pointed out VIN as your primary level of detail is fairly flawed. You should also be filtering on vehicle registrations. A possible scenario here is someone owns their car, gets into an accident, repairs it or sells it off (insurance sell off). Someone else buys it gets difference insurance, and has an accident because its a new car to them. You would never know this vehicle story without integrating the registration history or at least buy and sell dates to know it has exchanged hands.
Yes Fraud is tricky, but a VIN does not equal a person (PII) committing the behavior, and these poor association attempts leave innocent people screwed by insurance companies. What makes this bad analysis annoying, is the constant caveats, if you know VIN associations don't prove fraud then maybe don't build some sort of risk scoring on it, and then try an sell it.
So many alternative explanations unmentioned:
1. Drink/drugs impair your judgment, making you more likely to commit fraud if you were on the fence, or the impulsive sort.
2. Drunk drivers get into multiple accidents, but some are able to keep evidence of impairment off the record (buddy on the force or the insurance co, etc.)
3. Drivers doing drugs that aren't detectable on the spot, and clear the body quickly, reducing evidence of drug use in crashes.
4. More people are likely to do drink/drugs at night, so if 1-3 are true, we should expect to see more crashes at night. Likewise for a lack of witnesses (fewer passengers or bystanders).
Most importantly, statistics are completely absent from the article. Does OP have any evidence these numbers wouldn't fit the correct random distribution? I know the point of fraud is to appear natural, but if done well, that means evidence has to be collected by other means, and this kind of analysis is only a weak signal.
Why would it be unlikely that the person committing fraud is under the influence? There's no reason to assume that.
Because they know that a cop is about to show up, is my guess.
Some states have "alcohol-exclusion laws" which make it possible for insurers to deny coverage if you had a car accident while intoxicated.
I guess that might be one explanation?
I read that as assuming the fraudsters were professionals in a sense, i.e. doing it in an organized way. Wouldn't those kinds of criminals try to keep it looking clean?
I'm a little skeptical, it would be interesting to add odometer data, time of day, and distance from home. My driving is on low end of the collision risk spectrum because I don't drive much, mostly day time, and mostly routes that I've driven hundreds or thousands of times and where know the lines of sight and cadence of traffic. On the other hand I would expect more risk for someone who worked night shifts, did taxi or delivery type driving where they're often in unfamiliar areas, or just plain put in more miles. I would expect these effects to create a wide collision frequency spread even holding constant skill and good intentions.
They just detected fraud suspicions and haven't found it yet. And this is not their business to detect fraud, that's up to investigators.
And it's not very wise to announce your metrics publicly. All fraudsters can read also.
Lol, wow! The article says
>After filtering out invalid VINs, we narrowed the dataset to roughly ~15 million crashes. (We also removed all drug and alcohol related crashes, since it’s unlikely someone committing insurance fraud would be under the influence.)
Which I immediately found extremely implausible. Seems like the author is very much NOT familiar with the type of people who commit insurance fraud.
In the next paragraph the article links to the FBI website on the fraud ring in Connecticut.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/staged-accident-ring
Which says
>After an autumn evening of drinking and using drugs in 2013, a group of friends got into an Audi A6 and drove to the remote Wilderness Road in Norwich, Connecticut. The car slid off the road, hitting a tree.
>Everyone in the car survived, but this seemingly typical crash was no accident.
>Despite their impairment, the driver and passengers had purposely planned the crash to collect the insurance money.
So yeah, don't exclude drug/alcohol related crashes. Also the author should read the first fucking sentence of the stuff they link. It's only six words in!
>Which I found very much not plausible.
Yeah. I'm not a fraud expert, but "impaired judgement" is a common effect of alcohol, and "desperation" is a common effect of drug addiction, so it seems weird to assume that people using drugs are committing fraud at a lower rate than the overall population rate.
As a side note, I grew up in Norwich so it's funny to see it mentioned in that report as "remote" because there isn't really anything remote in Norwich. Wilderness Rd, despite its name, does a ring around Mohegan Park, which is an urban-ish park with some trees and a rose garden. You can walk to the rose garden from the high school, which I sometimes did. Anyway.
I expected this to be about data found in the memory dump of a crashed process. (And was surprised they would post about this at all, given privacy issues.)
New Title: "We Can't Prove Insurance Fraud with Our Data"
> we never expected that a side by side look at Vehicle Identification Numbers and crash timelines would hint at possible insurance fraud.
Uh... I'm not surprised at all that auto insurance fraud, which involves vehicle collisions, might show up in vehicle collision data. This is sensationalist crap.