Probably one of the biggest misconceptions about the world of “investigation” is the whole thing of there always being that ‘smoking gun’ that the investigator finds right there at the scene, just being dropped at that exact moment by the guilty party… Job’s a good ‘un – we’re all heading home for an early finish on a Friday afternoon!

The reality is decidedly less glamorous and actually much more arduous. Take a case we worked on in the matter of a high value insurance fraud:

If you’ve done any form of investigation for long enough you start to get a ‘feel’ or a ‘scent’ for when things are off or not at all what they seem to be.

In this instance, the claimant alleged that on a particular evening at a particular time in a very specific area that she’d been hit by a driver who fled from the scene and who had subsequently left her with a high degree of injuries that meant she could not walk properly or work. She was making a claim for her injuries and her loss of earnings against the Motor Insurance Bureau.

The existence of ‘fraud’ per se just wasn’t there, staring us in the face and waiting for us to grab it, tag it and present it back to all involved.

There was things that didn’t seem quite right – but those things on their own are not strong grounds to void someone’s claim.

And that’s where the reality of investigation kicks in:

We poured through witness statements and listed the inconsistencies.

We got out there and knocked on doors.

We ticked the boxes needing ticked and dotted all the i’s.

And we waited on document disclosures to be released.

And we waited and waited some more.

Because no one works to your timeframe.

THEN you start consolidating it all and pouring over it… and before you know it you’ve stockpiled all the evidence to back up that things aren’t as the claimant originally said or that things could not have ever happened how you were told they did.

Because a truly effective insurance fraud investigation requires absolute thoroughness.

In this instance we were able to identify a complete contradiction in what the claimant had said when initially making her claim against what she said in her police report. We explored that contradiction which led us to a Facebook post that the claimant had been tagged in – thus revealing that she could not have been on that road on that day at that particular time because she was at a wedding in Scotland!

Further exploratory surveillance was sanctioned by our client and we were subsequently able to put a recommendation report back across that strongly refuted the claimant’s version of events.