More than $100 million in losses was prevented by the Insurance Crime Intelligence Network of Australia in its second year of operation, the ICA’s counter-fraud CEO Andrew Gill told the Sydney Claims Convention.

High-risk fraud claims identified by and stopped by insurers under the scheme increased by 27% in 2025, compared with 2024.

“That result is entirely due to the increased activity of the vendors as the maturity of the operations increases,” he said.

Mr Gill told attendees intelligence-sharing and communication is key to disrupting organised crime groups, who “exploit fragmentation, be it of law enforcement activities across jurisdictions or fragmentation of insurance company data.”

"The insurance industry is definitely not immune to them and I suspect in a lot of ways is probably more susceptible to them”.    

Mr Gill gave examples of these groups using synthetic identities, phone numbers, recycled vehicles, and shared bank accounts to perpetrate fraud across multiple insurers.

He explained how the criminals move through three stages: preparation/probing (testing insurer responses), perpetration (high-volume claims), and detection/disruption (where claims are declined).

He detailed "damage recycling" where the same vehicle is used for multiple fraudulent claims across different insurers, citing an example where a single vehicle was recycled seven times.

But he said the industry is fighting back and moving from isolated investigations to aggregated data analysis where the frauds are revealed. 

Tools include the Intelligence Bank, a system used to facilitate the sharing of open-source material, public tip-offs and law enforcement inquiries between insurers and police.

He gave one current example where Victorian police gave him the address of a fire-bombing, which he circulated through Intelligence Bank and connected the insurance investigator with the detective handling the crime. “That helps the police and helps the insurer.”

It will soon also involve an industry-wide analytics platform which aggregates claims data, including from the Australian Financial Crime Exchange to identify known money mule and fraud accounts.  

Real-time alerts can be generated if a claim is being settled into a suspicious account or if duplicate details appear across different insurers. 

Mr Gill also stressed the need to "follow the money", given that “insurers don’t settle claims by providing bags of cash” and settlements all end up in Australian bank accounts.  

“So without considering the beneficial bank accounts that are receiving the insurance accounts you’re missing at least 50% of the picture and that’s the part with the offender in it.”  

He said that while Australia is a “Johnny come lately” to this technology relative to other countries, it has the advantage of learning from them and building a more powerful database including wider, more diverse data points.  

He added that high-profile arrests and media coverage act as a significant deterrent to crime, highlighting the risk of imprisonment or deportation.

The Claims Convention is organised by the Australasian Institute of Chartered Loss Adjusters and Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance.