AI-enabled insurance fraud warning for fleets

Fleets are at risk of falling foul of insurance fraud, with images altered through artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more believable, according to FleetCheck.

Neil Avent, chief technical officer at the fleet software company, said there had been recent advances in the realism of both still and digital AI-generated images.

“There has been a real step change in the last few months with the more widespread availability of a technology called GANs – or generative adversarial networks,” he explained.

“This uses two neural networks in competition to create images and is now being offered by the mainstream image generation systems, replacing previous diffusion-style techniques.

“The result is that there has been a jump in the quality of video and image generation. 

“If you take an image of a vehicle that has been involved in an accident and asked AI to ‘add scratches and light dents along the door panel’ today then the output is much more convincing than it was even last year.”

The biggest potential for fraud is where an accident has occurred, and AI was used to exaggerate the level of damage that had resulted.

Avent continued: “If an employee is involved in a collision, the driver of the other vehicle may take pictures of the damage incurred and ask AI to basically make it worse to increase the value of the claim.

“One of the advantages of GANs technology is that it can do this across multiple images with a high degree of consistency.”

Avent believes that we are reaching a stage where it is not easy even for experts to see that some images have been manipulated.

“Fleets should be aware of the growing potential for fraud and its resulting impact on their insurance costs,” he added.

“However, there is a simple solution – asking your drivers who are involved in collisions to take pictures of all the vehicles involved, meaning that a complete record of the accident is created and later use of AI can be much more easily identified.”

Nick Hutson, compliance and training manager at 1st Choice Insurance, which partners with FleetCheck, explained that fraudulent and exaggerated insurance claims have been a “persistent issue for decades”. 

However, he said: “The methods used to carry them out have evolved significantly over time, becoming increasingly difficult to track and manage. 

“With AI-generated images and videos advancing rapidly, it’s becoming harder to spot manipulations, and there’s a strong likelihood that we’ve already encountered such claims without identifying them. 

“To help combat this, we encourage drivers to adopt additional procedures, such as taking comprehensive, clear photos from multiple angles and using technology to record accurate details at the scene. 

“These simple steps can make a big difference in identifying and preventing fraudulent claims.”

Established in 2006 and based in Kemble, Gloucestershire, FleetCheck has a customer base of more than 2,000 organisations operating 260,000 vehicles and assets.

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