Forensic Psychology For Dummies (48 page)

Considering how the evidence relates to the general pattern of similar events.

Assessing whether irrelevant information is likely to distract from the central issue.

Looking at whether the evidence contains too many references to people in general rather than specific persons.

Checking if the witness or defendant’s evidence contains a lot of modifiers, such as ‘sometimes’, ‘probably’ and so on.

Ways in Which Lying Is Used to Commit Crime

Some crimes depend a lot on lying and deceit. In this section I take a look at three criminal activities that make full use of misrepresenting the truth – insurance fraud, false allegations and extortion – and how forensic psychology can help to get at the truth.

Combating insurance fraud

Have you ever been in a position of making an insurance claim that wasn’t strictly accurate? For instance, claiming items on your insurance after being burgled, and then to your horror finding the items later on, and leaving it at that. Of course, you’re more likely to be one of the majority of citizens who’d never do anything so underhand, but sadly, otherwise totally law-abiding people do sometimes break the law by defrauding on insurance claims.

Many reasons exist why generally honest people lie in this way. A person may, wrongly, justify an insurance claim by saying he’s been paying insurance premiums for years and now it’s time for payback. Or he may argue that it doesn’t hurt anyone (untrue because everyone suffers by paying higher premiums as a consequence) and the insurance company makes lots of profits. A dishonest claim can even be a sort of revenge for another claim that was turned down in the past.

Many of the excuses you find yourself giving for having committed insurance fraud – denial, justification, minimisation and rationalisation – are similar to those that the hardened criminal gives for his actions (as I discuss in Chapter 2).

Committing insurance fraud is often seen as easy pickings: too many people think that they can get away with it. Over recent years insurance companies have tried to improve their ability to detect fraudulent claims (such as the method I describe in the earlier section ‘Voice stress analysis’). Companies also use more direct approaches, like asking for original copies of documents and sending inspectors round to check out claims. But an insurer’s business is dependent partly on how willing and ready the company is in dealing with a claim, so many would rather not check the claim too thoroughly and just bump up the premiums instead.

Those insurance companies that are aware of the importance of detecting lying immediately a claim is made have started using procedures like the one I’ve developed: the
Fraud Indicating Behaviours System
(FIBS). (Yes, you’re likely thinking the acronym’s the best part.) The following FIBS list gives you a framework for detecting deception. You can see from the list how I’ve turned my ideas about lying (including those I discuss in the earlier sections ‘Understanding the Nature of Lying’ and ‘Detecting Lies: Some Attempted Procedures’) into a simple system that you can use with only a little training. Insurance companies using FIBS are reporting a dramatic reduction in fraudulent insurance claims.

FIBS asks the following questions (I don’t tell you how the responses are used to determine fraud, so as not to give the game away):

Reaction: What is the claimant’s reaction to the event?

• How emotional was his reaction?

• Does his reaction seem unusual?

• Did he carry out his own investigation?

Detail: What sort of detail does the claimant give about the event?

• Are there gaps in the time of his account?