Soft targets

With insurers and bigger brokers taking fraud prevention seriously, fraudsters are increasingly seeing smaller high street brokers as a ‘softer’ target, explains David Priest

Once upon a time, fraud prevention in insurance was the preserve of the lone zealot. These individuals were suffered by senior management rather than embraced, their discipline regarded as a curiosity – something to be indulged but not necessarily taken seriously.

How times have changed. Fraud and the prevention of it is very much top of the industry agenda and rightly so. The most recent estimates suggest that fraud costs the industry £3bn a year with only £1bn of that actively detected by