Scout® Aids Government Agency in Bounce Back Loan Fraud Investigation
The challenge before Scout®
With businesses allowed to self-certify their applications, the Bounce Back Loan Scheme unfortunately suffered from incredibly high levels of fraud. OCGs set up vast networks of individuals and businesses, targeting across the banking sector. In order to try and recover the money loaned – estimated at around £26 billion of taxpayer money by the National Audit Office (NAO) – those individuals and businesses needed to be identified and then investigated quickly. Unfortunately, that process is incredibly costly and slow when done manually, while OCGs were moving vast to dispose of the funds and their assets and to register insolvencies.
How Scout® helped:
Scout® was used for a Proof of Concept (POC). Scout® searched for newly incorporated companies and to the search for full company profiles.
Once the data had been captured from various disparate data sets, a risk assessment was run to identify the highest risk businesses based on the agencies highest risk factors.
In 18 minutes, Scout® identified 600 newly incorporated business, created company profiles for all 600 and identified the highest risk 28.
This saved approximately 3 months of effort for the 6 person team and identified the highest risk business to engage with first.