These findings may not be conclusive, but are suggestive. The research warns that many youths are becoming cynical and willing to cheat whenever it suits them. What’s not precisely known, however, is how inclined these youths will be to commit insurance fraud as they grow older.

The results raises questions about how many young people could easily justify committing insurance fraud when they reach full adulthood. Is this population bulge also a fraud bulge in the making?

But what is known is how so-called Millennials (born after 1980) learn much of what they know about the world around them: They ’re first generation largely raised on social media.

Facebook, texting, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms are part of their social DNA. Millennials are the most wired-generation of our time. Much as Baby Boomers gained much of their worldview from television while growing up, social media is the Millennial playing field. Technology is their defining generational identity.

Social media thus may be a large breeding ground for young people’s attitudes about insurance fraud as well. Communicators who want to inform and influence these young people about insurance fraud must be fluent in how Millennials use new technology, and why.

“Steeped in digital technology and social media, they treat their multi-tasking handheld gadgets almost like a body part — for better and worse,” says “Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next,” a study by the Pew Research Center.

• Only 24 percent of Millennials get most of their news from newspapers;
• They’re more likely than any other generation to watch video online;
• They’re the least likely to have watched an hour of TV or read a daily newspaper in the last 24 hours;
• About 75 percent of Millennials have created a profile on a social-networking site (compared to half of Gen Xers);
• One of five have posted a video of themselves online;
• 41 percent say they have a cellphone and no landline;
• 25 percent say they’ve sent more than 50 text messages in the last 24 hours;
  

Some anti-fraud groups are making tentative steps to reach youths. Some efforts use social media, and others more-traditional means. But on balance, youths appear to have gained relatively little attention from anti-fraud outreach efforts.

The Virginia State Police held a YouTube video contest for college students in the state this year. It was themed “Dance Your Fraud Off,” Aimed a students 18 years and older, the contest was intended to help spread word around the Commonwealth that fraud is a costly dead-end street. Winners received $500 scholarships.

The Idaho Fraud Awareness Coalition this year awarded college scholarship money to students for writing winning essays on how insurance fraud affects Iowans. The scholarships are sponsored by State Farm. New Jersey’s Office of Insurance Fraud Prosecutor also has held student-essay contests.

The New York Alliance Against Insurance Fraud also has launched active and full-purpose Facebook and Twitter accounts. Though not specifically aimed at youths, these sites position the Alliance to effectively reach under-25ers as they enter fraud-rearing age.

The idea behind reaching youth early and often is to build solid anti-fraud values that will carry into adulthood. Social media are a primary source of information-gathering, news-reading, chatting, trading ideas and building highly networked digital communities. This makes social media a prime vehicle for reaching out to youths, and spreading word that fraud is a dead-end street.

Younger adults’ adroit use of social media helped spread outrage and mobilize mass protests that helped take down three seemingly entrenched Middle East regimes in just weeks this spring.

Maybe social media will help take down insurance fraud a few notches in America when Millennials reach full protesting age.

SIDEBAR

Execs: Social media important but not important enough

Most corporate executives think a social-media strategy is important for their business. Nearly 80 percent say social media is somewhat or very important.

But (and it’s a big “but”)...Only 27 percent of the executives have made social media a priority, says a survey by eMarketer. About half of the remaining executives also agree that social media is necessary, but they haven’t placed it high on their to-do lists.

Even so, they may be losing sleep about their languishing social-media efforts. Three of four execs think their companies are either barely keeping up or behind the curve.

Make society frown on fraud: Add human face

Insurance fraud’s vast scope and large dollar size pose a strategic challenge for communicators: How to make people view this crime behemoth as the costly public menace that it is.

More to the point, how to convince society to rally more widely against fraud — by passing tougher fraud laws...funding more anti-fraud budgets...convincing people to saying no when they’re tempted to inflate a claim...or inspiring them to dial a tollfree hotline when they suspect a fraud scheme.

Simply preaching about fraud’s damage or spooning out bullet lists of cold fraud data can only carry an anti-fraud message so far.

Putting a human face on fraud, and this crime’s luckless victims, is an effective way to break through that fog and reach people at a deeper level.

This involves telling true-life stories about fraud crimes. Profiling fraudsters, their underhanded motives and how they harm honest Americans and even whole families reveals the stark human damage behind the rows of cold and often opaque fraud data.

Stories thus capture people’s attention and foster a visceral understanding
that adds greater meaning to fraud data. This can also help energize broader societal opposition to this crime.

Communicators are finding creative ways to humanize fraud.

The Most Wanted list of suspected schemers on the run is an online feature promoted by the Florida Department of Financial Services. It evokes the FBI’s longstanding Ten Most Wanted roster. It’s a vehicle for detailing the crimes. Gritty mugshots and recaps of their crimes create visual anchors to attract viewers and help trigger people’s recall.

In a pilot program, FBI agents in Newark, N.J. have crafted digital “Wanted” ads for suspected health-insurance schemers. The ads are posted on bulletin boards along several interstates, and in 40 kiosks in 13 malls throughout New Jersey. They will run until September 25. If they produce enough leads, the concept will be scaled nationally. This is the first time the FBI has used ads to pursue a general anti-crime priority.

The Texas insurance department promotes its Top Insurance Fraud Cases. One of last year’s doozies involves a Pasadena agent who stole premiums from 85 trusting clients, leaving many without wind-peril coverage after a large storm.

A related approach is taken by the Texas-South chapter of the International Association of SIUs.

The insurer investigators teamed with Crime Stoppers of Houston to widely promote local fraud suspects who’ve evaded capture. One case involved resident David Hall, who burned his vehicle for an insurance payout. People were encouraged that they could earn a cool $5,000 by busting Hall with tips to a tollfree hotline.

Michigan’s biggest insurance cheaters get comeuppance through the top defrauders featured by the Michigan Insurance Fraud Awareness Coalition. The Ohio insurance department promotes its top enforcement cases of the year.

A British outfit called Car Insurance Comparison.org pulls no punches with its online 5 Dumbest Auto Insurance Fraudsters feature. Three family members said they were hurt in bus crash. They gave their insurer a video “proving” they were on the bus. But in an unforgettable “duh” moment, they forgot that the same video showed the supposedly injured people dancing and having a great time after the crash.

The Coalition has several online features that humanize fraud, fraudsters and their victims.

The online Fraud of the Month recounts a deplorable and sometimes knuckleheaded scheme launched in the previous month.

The annual Hall of Shame exposes the most-brazen schemers of the previous year. Here’s one sordid case from the No-Class of 2010: Bob Harper’s heart was failing, and the Oklahoma man urgently needed a pacemaker. But he discovered that he’d bought fake health insurance from a con artist who’d scammed thousands of consumers just like him.

The Coalition’s website and Facebook site also features “Faces of Fraud,” a full-color gallery of mugshots with brief capsules of the fraud crime or suspected crime.

Awards shine light on fraud and fraud fighting

Sentry Insurance investigator John Halliday uncovered a growing trend of staged-crash rings in the Tampa area. He alerted the area’s anti-fraud community, triggering a spate of investigations that have led to at least 80 arrests.

Halliday’s astute sleuthing earned him the Investigator of the Year award from the International Association of Special Investigation Units (IASIU). That’s one of four awards IASIU gives each year each year. Winners also receive an honorarium ranging from $500 to $1,000 to go with their trophy.

Several anti-fraud groups publicly honor their best and brightest by revealing outstanding achievements in combating fraud.

Awards like IASIU’s can be a helpful way to attract public attention to insurance fraud, and to the effective efforts of crime busters who are working hard to protect the public. The honors give the sponsoring organizations a chance to tell the anti-fraud story to the public.

Well-earned kudos also have an internal value: The awards promote best practices. They also strengthen the sponsoring organization’s sense of fraternity and shared mission, which can encourage membership promotion and retention.

The Coalition sponsors the Prosecutor of the Year award. It’s the only national award that showcases the impact prosecutors can have on fraud in their own backyards.

Last year’s winner was Jacksonville, Fla. prosecutor Joe Licandro. New to his job and learning about insurance fraud on the run, Licandro went after swindlers with a tenacity that quickly led to 77 prosecutions worth more than $2.5 million.

In one early success, he took down a shady auto-glass company that had made nearly 1,000 bogus claims for unneeded windshield repairs and replacements.

The Coalition is seeking nominations for Licandro’s successor, the eventual 2011 winner. Entries are due September 26. Nominators are free to package the nomination as creatively as they wish; there are no forms to fill out. The judges emphasize having an effective narrative that describes the prosecutor’s special achievements, plus data and other metrics to back up the storyline.

Perhaps the largest award program is sponsored by the Pennsylvania Insurance Fraud Prevention Authority (IFPA). The state agency honored fully 12 people this year. The awards covered the waterfront, ranging from a state legislator to a former deputy state attorney general to claims adjusters — and, of course several fraud investigators from insurers and law-enforcement.

Research: Women come down hardest on fraud

Women are tougher on insurance fraud than men, older consumers deplore this crime more than younger consumers, and everyone thinks fraud is widespread.

Those are core conclusions of a lead article in the summer issue of the Journal of Insurance Fraud in America, the Coalition’s leadership quarterly. JIFA features articles by some of the leading thinkers in their fields. The goal is to break new ground in society’s understanding of fraud, and how to better combat this crime.

“The strongest effect was shown for age, where the two youngest age groups expressed the highest tolerance of insurance fraud,” writes William C. Lesch, PhD, professor and chair of the marketing department of the University of North Dakota.

“This posture was shown to differ markedly from that taken by persons aged 35+. This adds to our understanding of insurance fraud, and is consistent with earlier studies. The effect of gender was also reinforced, and ‘rang true’ with the few earlier published studies. Males tended to express a lower level of ethical standard than female counterparts.”

Lesch’s article reanalyzed data from of a 2007 consumer-attitude study by the Coalition. There are few studies of consumer attitudes about insurance fraud, and Lesch’s article is one of newest reviews.

As for how tough people think insurers should be on cheaters by denying claims: “...the most-aggressive attitudes toward denials of claim payments under terms of misrepresentation were held by the 65+ group, and these were most-different from the two youngest groups. Otherwise, the more-mature groups (35+) differed from the most-youthful in approving valid claims and denying those that were invalid,” Lesch writes.

Elsewhere in the Summer issue of JIFA...

• Courts increasingly allow discovery of social-networking sites of fraud suspects, even when the suspects limit public access with security settings, write Minnesota law professor Gregory Duhl and Jaclyn Millner, then an attorney with a law firm but now with Liberty Mutual.

• Old-school arson investigators are hacks whose inaccurate investigations could convict innocent people. A modern science of arson investigation is overtaking the old ways of examining fire scenes, concludes nationally known arson consultant and investigator John Lentini, CFEI.

• Some state and local anti-fraud programs are losing budget funds in a downturned economy, thus materially affecting fraud fighting in some of those regions, says an article by the Coalition’s Jim Quiggle.

Prohibiting early and unneeded solicitation of crash victims for bogus injury treatment will make these insurance schemes harder to pursue, and criminalizing this behavior will make it easier for law enforcement to track down the schemes, says noted Texas attorney Albert Betts.

Annual report publishes with a purpose

Performing with a Purpose. That’s the theme of the Coalition’s 2011 annual report. It recounts a year of purpose-driven achievement spanning legislation, public outreach and anti-fraud policy.

Some 33 state fraud laws were inked onto the books last year, and the Coalition was involved in many of them. Three Coalition-backed bills went into law in Rhode Island, for example. They impose tougher penalties on crooked body shops, insurance agents and peddlers of shady medical discount plans.

Swindlers were selling fake health coverage to consumers around the U.S. The Coalition spotted the troubling trend early in the year and launched a coast-to-coast news campaign that generated national headlines for months.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sought the Coalition’s support when she announced important new Medicare and Medicaid fraud regulations. The Coalition shared the dais with Secretary Sebelius, intently backing her call for more anti-fraud resources.

“Fraud fighters bring immense resolve to a shared mission — whether the economy is up, down or just holding steady,” the chairperson’s opening letter says. “We’re relentlessly protecting the public wellbeing. It’s how we perform...it’s our purpose.”