Insurance Claims to be Tested by Lie Detector

Albanach writes "HBOS, one of the largest UK banks is to introduce random lie detector analysis of insurance claims according to this article from the Edinburgh Evening News. The three month trial will see calls from its 1.5 million policy holders randomly subjected to voice stress analysis. Those flagged up will then receive a set of questions designed to expose 'potential fraudsters'."

Comments

Silly

[grennis]

Wouldn't it be natural to have stress in your voice if something has happened in your life causing you to file an insurance claim?

Re:Silly

[ihummel]

And some people (like me) would find any such interrogation stressful.

Stress?

[BWJones]

So, when their customer who has just been involved in an auto accident calls and reports the accident to the insurance, their voice will not in the least be affected by stress?

It's a Manipulation Tactic

[Greenisus]

Lie detectors are not effective. This is just being used to scare people into thinking they can't lie.

Re:It's a Manipulation Tactic

[PurpleFloyd]

What happens if you get falsely accused? Lie detectors are at best random and can be conciously affected by an adept scammer (when you tell something you want to be recognized as the truth, relax, when you tell something you want to be detected as a lie, tense up a few muscles subtly; the toes are ideal as long as you wear shoes). Lie detectors are bogus science; while there may be physiological responses associated with dishonesty, they can be easily overwhelmed by other stresses (like going into a lie detector test and being grilled mercilessly). Also, it's very rare that two polygraph "experts" will read the results the same way. You might "fail" the test, while if your results had been interpreted by someone else, you might have "passed."

This is not just bad, this is awful. If you were falsely accused, you could land in jail and be out thousands of dollars in fines. Even if you miraculously avoided all that, you would still be left with a valid insurance claim that wouldn't be paid, despite the fact that you paid your premiums and did nothing wrong, other than fail a pseudoscientific test.

As for the supposed deterrent effect, that's a ridiculous analogy. You might as well suggest that we fine and jail people who "look suspicious" at random; you would get the same results. While you'd certainly catch criminals, you'd also punish a number of completely innocent people. Deterrent effect? No, there's a difference between deterrents and people living in fear of the law. The fact that polygraph tests are generally inadmissable in American and European courts should tell you something about what effects this would have.

Re:It's a Manipulation Tactic

[PurpleFloyd]

Let's take a hypothetical scenario:
You have a fairly new, expensive car with good comprehensive insurance. You leave the alarm system disabled by accident one day, and your car is stolen. You submit a claim to the insurance company and file a police report. A few days later, you are called into their office, to give a statement into a tape recorder. You fail the "voice stress analysis." Due to this, the insurance company starts to dig. They find that you left your alarm off, and think they can take you to court. You are taken to court and convicted of fraud, and punished accordingly. You are punished, but did nothing wrong.

What's the point I'm trying to make? It's simple: these essentially random tests will be used to determine who is suspected of a crime and thus investigated further, with a heavy bias towards criminal activity - investigators will tend to look for any evidence at all that might support the "criminal activity" theory, and doubt evidence that disproves that theory. It's a basic tenet of psychology that people tend to choose one theory and build up supporting evidence for it, while disregarding evidence that might disprove it.

Of the many cases detected by this "lie detector," there are almost certainly cases that have done nothing wrong, but have a large amount of circumstantial evidence against the person making the claim. While circumstantial evidence is technically inadmissable in court, expensive legal attack teams, like the ones held on retainer or employed by large companies like insurers and banks, can get away with almost anything and make it look reasonable. I doubt you could afford your own counterattack lawyers.

The end result is that it's possible for innocents to be punished. While I agree that insurance fraud is without a doubt a Bad Thing, and deterrents to insurance fraud are good, the chance of error here is simply too high.

Re:Yea right, I'm sure

[oniony]

I really don't believe they would be allowed to do this without prior consent. Calls are typically prefixed with a "this call may be recorded for training purposes" but I doubt they would be able to do the same thing for detecting fraud.

More likely, one would have to consent in writing which they may offer a reduced premium to encourage people to sign up. (In reality, the money they save will possibly not be passed on: instead the 'reduced premium' could end up as being the usual price and those not signing up will pay a penalty).

This is news?

[henbane]

So insurance companies have found yet another way to bog down any legitimate claim you might have so they can keep the inflated premiums they took off you.

Any time they come up with BS like this they always claim it will lower premiums and give some inflated figure of how much fraudulent claims are costing them, but who is to say how many of those fraudulent claims are not just the companies finding a loophole to screw anybody who makes a claim.

Can't stand them, they have a business model where everybody has to give them money and they resent anybody with a legitimate claim to it.

Lie detectors don't always work

[Perdurabo26]

I've been submitted to a lie detector one time. Basically my house was broken into, and to clear my name, the police wanted to give me a lie detector test (i don't know off hand what kind it was) but i basically failed the test. The problem is that I failed the preliminary test too. I failed questions that were specifically designed to be correct.

Do you live in the state of michigan?

Do you live in the United States?

Are you 17 years old?

If you can't pass questions that are geared to be absolutely correct, than why do they still consider you failing the actual test as you lieing? I'm afraid something like this would happen in this situation.

Just giving my $0.02 worth.

Innocent until tested guilty

[eaolson]

I love this bit:

And Mr Hemingway said there will be measures in place to make sure only fraudsters are trapped, rather than those who naturally find making such phone calls difficult.

Apparently the system isn't capable of false positives. "You can't be innocent, the machine says you're guilty. And since only guilty people are caught by the machine, you can't be innocent. QED."

Also note that the article is talking about voice-analysis stress testing (over the phone, surely that couldn't ever be inaccurate), not polygraphs. Polygraphs are a crock as well, of course, but this isn't them.

Re:why is this a problem?

[geekoid]

1) innocent people trigger lie detectors.

2) It becomes a 'prove your innocent' case if someone thinks you are lying.

3)people come to trust machines. So they will take a failable machine over a person.

4)the agent has to look at evicence and facts to determin wether you are lying.

5)IT put the burden of proof onto the victim.

I'm fine with that...

[FJ]

... as long as I can do the reverse. I want to make sure that when my insurance rep says "your covered" he doesn't mean "your covered as long as you never make a claim."

I also want to get a truthful answer to the question "Will I be dropped after my first claim?"

Re:Yea right, I'm sure

[ozbon]

I'm more intrigued about the stress-levels part. They're testing it in the household insurance department, which means they'll be dealing with fun things like people who've just been burgled, or who've come home to find everything destroyed by fire/flood/whatever.

Surely under these circumstances, the voice-stress meters will be pegging all kinds of false positives and so on? I know I'd be all over the place, so any stress analysis is likely to be inherently flawed in such a situation...

Re:Complete Text of Article

[rifter]

"Honest policyholders will have nothing to fear and combating fraud will make things better for them anyway by helping to keep premium costs down."

Of course they leave out:

1) He was lying.

2) Since he is a practiced glib liar there was no hint of stress in his voice at all.

First off, I have to laugh when I read an article where lie detectors are described as "scientific" "sophisticated" and "accurate." They are frequently described as such, but it is clearly not the case. Even proponents, when pressed, always end up admitting that the "lie detector" is supposed to test stress levels; in other words, proponents of lie detectors usually lie in order to push them as a panacea.

Secondly, the biggest, oldest lie any insurance company can tell is that their rates are going to go down if you allow them to implement something. Insurance companies have historically tried to push legislation, promising practically every time that such legislation / policy change / newfound power will result in lower rates (mandatory automobile coverage comes to mind) but it never does. I go so far as to say I would think anyone would be hard pressed to come up with a single form of insurance in which rates have *ever* gone down, in fact.

Thirdly, the insurance company says that lie detector tests have been successful in reducing fraud. They do not qualify this at all, but I would think being able to point to a number and say "We were able to deny X million dollars worth of claims on the basis of lie detector tests alone!" would be considered a success, especially considering that the avoidance of paying claims, at any cost, any way they can is a goal to all insurance companies second only to raking in your cash.