Published by Tyler Wood, Operations Manager at Crime Tech Solutions
December 7, 2015 – Nice post on LinkedIn today written by Aaron Denbo, Lead Trainer at Frauducate Counter-Fraud Academy…

The game has changed. Insurance Fraud isn’t the “quiet fraud” committed by otherwise “normal” people fudging a bit on their past driving experience, prior injuries, work status, or income. It is an $80 BILLION dollar a year problem and it funds and fuels organized crime rings, drug cartels, and terrorism. In a recent article by Christopher Tidball at PropertyCasualty360, “We’re seeing organized trans-national crime rings that are using insurance fraud as a vehicle to fund illegal activities.”
$80 BILLION is a lot of money. That’s a lot of well-funded death and destruction that can be bought and that’s just from the Insurance Fraud front.
That $80 BILLION also includes terrorism, which is more poignant than ever in the wake of both the Paris and the San Bernardino, California terrorist attacks. Combating insurance fraud – and fraud in general — has never been more important.
Now those of us who are counter-fraud professionals and have completed training in identifying, detecting, and investigating fraud and work fraud cases know that what we do is important. Your friends and family probably have a general understanding of what you do but have you connected your work to combating organized crime or terrorism? Have you thought of your work as part of a bigger piece that just might combat the next wave of terrorism? Have you thought of your fraud fighting in terms of making it so that some bad people with bad intentions might just not be able to make that extra explosive device because you disrupted their funding?
After San Bernardino, after Paris, after …. [insert next terror attack here]maybe we should think of ourselves not just as fraud fighters but also as disrupters and agitators to terror groups and organized crime rings. It is a change in awareness and mentality that I’m advocating here, an expansive sense of purpose. Terrorism Finance is more than just working Anti-Money Laundering cases now or leaving that to a problem that the banking sector has to face. It means our insurance fraud investigations are more than just money for our companies or agencies. It means we’re playing for keeps now.

__

Crime Tech Solutions delivers powerful link and social network analysis software to insurance companies to find hidden and suspicious connections between people, places, and things.