When a Philadelphia attorney wanted to investigate a person who had been at fault in a severe car accident, he reached out to Fraud Sniffr, a social media investigation solutions company, who identified and verified the person’s social media profiles. It was found that he was one of the main organizers of the car club that has been performing illegal car driving stunts for the last three years. The police report indicated the person who caused the accident was going 73 mph in a 25-mph zone, which was a behavior consistent with the social media findings. Fraud Sniffr’s report, eventually, helped the attorney to establish a history of reckless driving, which allowed the accident victim receive more appropriate compensation for their injuries. This is only one of the many cases investigated by Marci De Vries and her experienced team who are on a journey to expose obviously inflated or untrue insurance claims using social media data.

It is been reported that insurance fraud steals at least $308.6 billion every year from American consumers; fraud occurs in about 10 percent of property-casualty insurance losses. Through Fraud Sniffr’s solutions, Marci aims to reduce this loss by providing court-ready and comprehensive information about targets with social media data. “This data changes the trajectory of the claim, which in turn lowers insurance premiums for every insured person in the US,” states Marci.

The company’s proprietary [Observr] software was designed for the specific needs of the insurance and legal defense industries and how they use social media data to resolve matters. It allows “one click” updates to a social media harvest, so that an insurance adjuster or attorney can click a button in their system to scan a person’s profiles, and the [Observr] bot would deploy and gather all new public information since the last update.

When developing [Observr], Marci identified two additional necessary solutions. “First, we realized that social media content storage created a high-risk for version control. Prior to our software, the teams would routinely have five or six versions of a social media report; each covering different dates.”   Second, this work created a critical need for a flexible way to share very large file sizes such as live stream videos. To address both concerns, the team added ‘invitation access’ so multiple members of the claims and legal teams can be invited to view an individual file, and each member will only see the most current version of the content. For Marci and team, FS [Observr] has been critical to the success of the company, as they use it not only to deliver content to their clients but also to reference their work when clients call in with questions.

Being a problem-solver by nature, Marci believes in building constraints and roadblocks in her mind into a shape, almost like a room, and figure out how to live and grow the company within the shape of that room. “Admittedly, sometimes the shape gets a little tight, but if you commit to working within the available space, you can always do the work,” she adds. With her resiliency and can-do attitude, Marci keeps a close eye on Fraud Sniffr’s successes as well as its challenges to steer the company toward whatever end point she wants to achieve. Be it a concern or success, she encourages the team to take time to take a look at the full picture. “When we see a success trend, then we dive in to look at repeatable tactics to drive further success.”

Incidentally, she says, the biggest challenge while starting a business in the insurance industry is the industrial-strength entropy. “Insurance is in the business of insuring itself against any bad outcome which makes them feel invulnerable. Teaching the value of a new procedure to mitigate losses is something that takes time, trust, and so much patience.” This is clearly evident in Fraud Sniffr’s success journey.