The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) has released a report that has indicated that almost half of all of the suspicious property/casualty insurance claims made to insurance companies come from California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Michigan.
In fact, those five states alone make up 49 percent of the total number of “questionable claims” in the entire country, according to the NICB’s calculations, as presented in the report.
The NICB’s definition of a questionable claim is one that is passed on to the NICB by insurance companies who are members of the organization, so that it can receive a closer investigation and review as there may be one or several red flags that indicate that fraud may be possible. The report published by the NICB involves an analysis of questionable claims within the United States over the three-year period between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2010.
Similarly, the NICB also released the top cities responsible for submitting the most questionable claims. The leading five were Los Angeles, New York City, Houston, Tampa, and Detroit. That said, Florida alone has three cities which were in the top ten for questionable claims. They were: Tampa, Orlando, and Miami.
When the statistics for the report started, in 2008, there were 74,676 total questionable claims referred to the NICB. By 2009, this number had jumped up to 85,018. In 2010, the number of questionable claims rose again to 91,730. This means that between 2008 and 2010, there was an increase of 23 percent in questionable claims.
The leading policy type of questionable claim was personal automobile, where the most commonly cited types of claim were false or exaggerated injury or suspicious vehicle theft.
