What
started life nearly a year ago as a relatively simple proof of concept
to analyse Virgin Trains’ Delay Repay data to determine if we could
detect whether fraudulent claims were being made, culminated in a dark
drizzly night in Leicester where we were crowned Best Newcomer at the Retail Risk Fraud Awards.

If
you’re of the technical persuasion and want to know more about how the
application works your can read all about it in its creator Callum’s Blog.
Train
Operating Companies (TOC’s) in the UK estimate that anywhere between
10-30% of the Delay Repay claims that they pay out are fraudulent;
individuals claiming compensation for trains they were never on or
claiming multiple times using a system of false names and addresses.
This represents tens of £millions in financial losses. Until now the
only real option for identifying fraudulent claims was a retrospective
hunt through vast amounts of claims data but once a claim has been paid
it is a lengthy and expensive process to try and recoup the lost money.
For
the proof of concept In November 2018 we took some of the most common
traits associated with potentially fraudulent claims; things like an
unusually high number of claims, multiple claims from the same address
or email address, claims for impossible journeys (ie journeys the
claimant couldn’t possibly have been on) and built indicators that would
search for these traits in the delay repay claims and flag a result if a
sufficiently high threshold was breached. The proof of concept began
finding fraud immediately. So much so that a business case for a more
comprehensive solution was quickly approved development of the full
application began in early 2019.
Our full Rail Fraud solution
now has 25+ fraud indicators and can either be installed alongside our
Rail Compensation suite on the ServiceNow platform or it can be
integrated with a TOC’s existing Delay Repay or CRM solutions. When
potential fraud is detected to a high degree of certainty the
compensation claim is frozen preventing payment from being made while
the case can be investigated by the TOC’s revenue protection team.
Virgin Trains estimates that in the last year of operating this solution £330, 000 of revenue has been protected.
But back to that drizzly night at Leicester City Football club. We had a
fantastic night celebrating with our colleagues and friends at Virgin
Trains. We’d like particularly like to thank Retail Knowledge for
recognising our achievement…we’d also like to thank the Academy, our
families and Ben for his terrible moon-dance routine at the end of the
night.