In this post, I take a quick look at a new database on insurance frauds and discuss potential research questions related to this topic.
I recently came across this website of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. It provides resources to raise awareness on insurance frauds and compiles legislative updates that may be relevant for the industry professionals as well.
Interestingly, they also provide a Fraud Tracker, which provides details on the reports of frauds. A snippet of the data is shown below:
As you can see from the headlines, these cases include both the initial filing of lawsuits by the insurance companies as well as data breaches.
To get a better sense of the insurance frauds, I decided to scrape their entire database. Fortunately, the data is rendered in static pages so I was able to obviate the need to use Selenium. (See [this post](https://www.bestproxyreviews.com/scrapy-vs-selenium-vs-beautifulsoup-for-web-scraping/#:~:text=While Scrapy is the tool,a better web scraping developer.) for the different types of web scraping).
I first look at the number of frauds over time for different types of insurance. In the figure below, I plot the number of insurance frauds for major insurance types in each year:
Overall we see a general increasing trend across all lines of businesses. The increase is most pronounced for auto, life, and medical frauds, whereas the number has stayed relatively constant in the past decade for workers compensation and homeowners insurance.