Counter-fraud in property claims: the pre-loss baseline finally exists
Most property fraud is opportunistic, not organised — and most of it would fail against a photoreal baseline of the asset as it was the day before the loss.
Most property fraud is opportunistic, not organised — and most of it would fail against a photoreal baseline of the asset as it was the day before the loss.
The Insurance Fraud Bureau and the ABI publish steady figures on detected fraud. The conversation inside underwriting and claims teams is different. Detected fraud is the floor of the problem. Inflated claims — items added that were never there, damage exaggerated, valuations stretched — sit between obvious fraud and a clean claim, and they cost the industry hundreds of millions a year.
The honest reason most inflated claims succeed is that no one has a credible record of what the property looked like before the loss. Surveyors' reports are written; underwriting photos are partial; the policyholder's evidence is whatever they can supply. The adjuster's job is to reconstruct a baseline retrospectively, often against motivated counterparties. That is structurally hard.
A photoreal 3D digital twin of the insured property, captured at inception, is a deposition. Every fitted asset is visible, dimensioned and dated. Walls, ceilings, flooring, plant, signage, stock, art and FF&E all sit in the same coordinate frame. The capture takes a few hours; the storage cost is trivial; the legal weight is significant.
At first notification of loss, the adjuster opens the twin alongside the post-loss capture. The diff is visual. The questions move from "did this exist?" to "how do we replace it?". Three measurable effects show up:
The same twin that supports counter-fraud feeds the rest of the property cycle. Underwriters get a defensible risk picture: actual roof condition, actual compartmentation, actual housekeeping. Pre-renewal surveys can be remote-first, with site visits reserved for material change. RICS-qualified building surveyors can issue reports from a desk on properties they would previously have travelled to.
For loss adjusters this is operating leverage. The same human capacity handles more claims because the time on site falls. For MGAs, schemes and Lloyd's syndicates writing commercial property, sub-classes that were previously too expensive to survey become economically viable.
Pre-loss capture is most defensible at three points: at inception of a new policy, at renewal of a complex risk, and after any material change in occupancy or fabric. Hardware-light capture — an iPhone Pro plus the OnXR Capture app — covers most commercial premises in under a day. Higher-value or sensitive risks justify the OnXR handheld scanner for measurement-grade capture.
Industries with high claims leakage exposure — commercial property, hospitality, retail, light industrial, education and healthcare estates — see the most rapid return. Specialty lines such as fine art, jewellers' block and yacht hulls have been baselining for years; the technology has finally caught up with mid-market property.
The most common pushback we hear from claims directors is not technical. It is operational: "who captures, when, and who pays?" The honest answer is that the unit economics already favour the insurer. The cost of a baseline scan on a single mid-market commercial property is recovered on the first prevented inflated claim and pays back across the book through reduced leakage and shorter cycle times.
The shift is gradual; the direction is one-way. Within the next three to five years we expect baseline capture to become a default expectation on commercial property over a threshold value, written into policy wording the way alarm and fire system inspection already is.
The choice for an insurer now is not whether to adopt spatial evidence. It is whether to be one of the carriers that brands the standard, or one that follows it.
