We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data

We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data April 22, 2025 When we set out to build geospatial risk scores for vehicle crashes at Matrisk AI, we never expected that a side by side look at Vehicle Identification Numbers and crash timelines would hint at possible insurance fraud. But data sometimes surprises you. Below, I’ll walk through how we stumbled upon this discovery, what we found, and why it might matter for anyone insuring vehicles. A curious hunch Our main focus has been risk scores: Where are crashes most frequent? What are the road conditions? Which stretches of highway see severe outcomes? Yet, a handful of states in our dataset disclose VINs for each crash, and that simple addition changed everything. Why VINs are a big deal They let us track exactly which vehicle is in multiple crashes, not just a vague “car in two accidents.” They allow us to approximate when that vehicle might have switched insurance carriers. They open the door to spotting suspicious patterns (lik ... Read full article.