We have all read the funny insurance claims online. The ones where people make up absurd excuses, and you just shake your head, wondering how they ever thought they could get away with it. A personal favorite is the elephant insurance claims where a car dealership rents an elephant as a gimmick to pull in customers, but the elephant decides to sit on one of the cars. Insurance companies have heard the craziest excuses, some of them even true, but some of them end up being false insurance claims as well. And those are no good.
Insurance companies and those people who honestly pay and use their insurance end up paying more when fraudulent insurance claims go through. It is not fair to the honest insurance buyer to have to pay for what someone else lied about, so insurance companies have gotten good at detecting false insurance claims. The following are the top four ways in which insurance companies can detect and investigate suspiciously fraudulent claims.
1. Perform Cross Checks
This is one of the easiest processes. All they need to do is look in their database, or at other insurance companies data, to see if the claimant has been getting more checks, or making more claims, than the average insurer should be. Chances are they will not chock it up to bad luck and dig deeper to find the real impetus for so many claims.
2. Investigate Via Social Media
Yes, claimants are dumb enough to brag about their fraud on social media. The insurance companies are now regularly checking Facebook and Twitter accounts to see if there is anything suspiciously related to a recent claim or reward.
3. Hire Outside Help
The insurance companies will even go so far as to hire a special investigations team or a private investigator to look into some fraudulent claims. If it is big enough or serious enough, they will go to extreme lengths to prove the claimant fraudulent, and make them pay for it.
4. Suspicious Loss Indicators
These are red flags that insurance companies know to look for. They look to see if a claimant is completely unphased while applying for a large, seemingly disastrous claim. Or if coverage was added or increased conveniently right before something happens. Or if a medical claim is filed by a seasonal employee just before their tenure at work comes to an end.
Think before you claim. If it is not honest, it is not worth it.