You’ve heard the story time and time again: a homeowner loses a job or gets behind on paying the mortgage and ends up in debt. The homeowner figures collecting insurance payments will solve their financial woes, so they decide to set their property on fire. Insurance fraud motivates thousands of annual fires, and insurance investigators are responsible for segmenting intentional fires from accidental ones.
Property insurance investigations often run into problems when extensive damage limits the “finding potential” of field investigations. Even if a fraudster intends to burn down a small structure on their property to collect an insurance payment, there is no guarantee that the fire will not spread on the same lot or to the neighbor’s house. Given the speed with which fires spread and destroy, there is often a lack of physical evidence pointing to the fire’s origin after the blaze is put out. Thus, investigators often need to follow a suspect’s “paper trail” to uncover an act of arson fraud.
Arson fraud is costly for both your insurance company and customers. Because arson causes over $100 Billion in insured property damages each year, insurance companies experience significant leakage and are forced to frequently raise premiums, especially when investigations have insufficient evidence to prove intentional fire-setting.
Pipl SEARCH helps your investigators follow a suspect’s paper and digital trail with ease. You can type a single identity attribute into Pipl SEARCH to uncover a suspect’s address history, public facing social media accounts, and many other identity attributes to be probed for “warning signs” of arson fraud. For guidelines on how Pipl SEARCH functions within arson investigations, read our Investigate Whitepaper here.