It began with an unintended discovery: A man in southern California filed an indemnity claim with the Postal Service after he sent a Priority Mail parcel that was never delivered. He declared, by mistake, the value lost was $100 when it was actually $5
When the Postal Service reimbursed him without question, a lightbulb went off in his head and thus ensued a $2.3 million indemnity fraud scheme. The Postal Service didn’t detect the fraud — how was it our special agents cracked the case?
When it comes to financial fraud, criminals leave a rat’s nest of information behind to avoid detection. Imagine if you wanted to defraud a courier by filing multiple claims using your name and address — immediate flags would go up on the courier’s end. This is similar to what we’re seeing in the retail industry, where online companies are flagging and denying claims when a given customer makes too many returns.
Fraudsters use a series of techniques to obfuscate any personal identifying information to send investigators searching for a needle in a haystack. But our Financial Fraud investigators are highly trained, and their efforts are bolstered by state-of-the-art data analytics tools developed in house. The tools led our special agents to suspicious transactions and their subsequent investigation revealed the perpetrator and a co-conspirator — his brother.
