Visualizing Insurance Fraud

Fraud refers to the abuse of the assets of an organization, company, or person to make a profit. Many companies worldwide become victims of fraudsters even though most of them tend to believe that fraud is something that "could not happen to them". In general, most fraud cases are not being identified immediately, but only after remarkable damage has been caused. Unfortunately, this damage does not limit only on a severe economic loss but also invokes other liability issues towards clients, employees, financial institutions, and many other involved entities. Thus, it is fundamental to be able to identify fraud cases immediately and respond quickly.

Fraud detection refers to all the methods and techniques applied for the identification of potential fraud cases, their investigation to determine whether the identified cases are actual fraud cases or not, and the response to them. Unfortunately, there exist a lot of different fraud types and no unique mechanism that can identify all of them. Thus, auditors have to develop separate strategies to combat each type of fraud.

Insurance fraud occurs when the insurers intentionally raise "fake" insurance claims to gain insurance benefits to which they are not entitled. It also includes cases where a person denies to pay an insurance benefit that is due.

Insurance fraud can be classified based on its extent, either as "hard" or "soft". The first category refers to cases where a fraudster intentionally plans, causes, or fakes a loss to obtain reimbursement from the insurance company. This type of fraud includes, for example, a car accident, an auto theft, a fire, or even a fake death. In most cases, committing such a fraud requires more than one involved person. The second category refers to situations where the insurers claim from the insurance company reimbursements higher than the actual ones for services to which, however, they are entitled. For example, they claim more damages or more severe injuries in a car accident or state that the property stolen during a theft costs more than its actual cost. Fraud cases of this category tend to be more frequent and usually are unplanned.

Calculating the loss caused by insurance fraud is quite difficult since most of the cases are never identified. However, certain insurance fraud types like health care fraud affect not only the insurance companies themselves, but the society in total since the loss of the insurance companies is passed on to all their insured clients. It is hence, fundamental to be able to identify this fraudulent activity as soon as possible.

The detection of insurance fraud schemes requires an investigation of a vast amount of data that stems from many different anti-fraud systems with varying types of data. The auditors have to combine all these data and use statistical methods to uncover suspicious claims, which in most cases, is time-consuming and inefficient.

Visualizations, on the other hand, can enhance the quick identification of relationships and significant structures. Suspicious patterns that may hide in this amount of data an be easily detected. Ideally, the auditors can also interact with the visualization, view the stored data, or even explore the dependency of the data with the time that they happened.

A typical pattern to look for is the so-called fraud ring, i.e., several persons that are (all or a part of them) involved in more than one series of events. For example, in a quite common insurance fraud scenario, auditors look for potential fraud rings. For this case scenario, fraud cases can be easier detected through the visualization rather than when trying to dig into a large number of database raws.

One of the most challenging tasks when using visualization for fraud detection is the sheer amount of data that is usually obtained by auditing systems. First, the auditor has to retrieve the data from the auditing system.

Visualizing such a large amount of data is the next challenge: the data needs a meaningful arrangement to create a human-readable representation. Providing suitable styling should enable users to identify different types of entities and relations.

Furthermore, high performance is essential to allow for interactive exploration of the data utilizing the benefits of graph database visualization.

A typical insurance fraud scenario involves fraudsters that stage fake car accidents and require reimbursement from the insurance companies for small injuries and damages that cannot be confirmed quickly by the insurance companies. Such scenarios may involve some or all passengers of the involved cars, the witnesses of the accidents, doctors, or lawyers.

This scenario involves the same persons that participate in the same series of accidents playing a different role each time, e.g., a person can appear one time as the driver of an involved car, another time as a witness of another car accident, and other times as a passenger. In such cases, also, the fraudsters can share the same lawyer and/or doctor who will confirm the accident.

Building such a visualization from scratch can be a challenging task. However, developers can save a lot of money, time, and workforce by using a software library that provides ready-to-use components for this task.

yFiles for HTML is a commercial programming library designed explicitly for diagram visualization and is a perfect fit for the challenges of fraud detection. The sophisticated layout algorithms of yFiles can comfortably transform the data in a readable, pleasing, and informative network. The different layout styles enable the user to intuitively identify structural characteristics of the data, such as cycles, connected components, or hierarchies.

yFiles for HTML comes with a Fraud Detection Sample Application. It provides a visualization of time-dependent data for the detection of insurance fraud. The example consists of three different parts: the main diagram, the timeline component, and the details component.

With yFiles, fraud detection diagrams can be realized on all supported platforms. The source code of the Fraud Detection Sample Application that comes with yFiles for HTML is available on the yWorks GitHub repository and part of the yFiles for HTML package.