Technique 'maps' crash suspect

By Rowan Bridge
BBC Radio 5 live

In November 2005 Patel staged two fake collisions within an hour

As Mohammed Patel is jailed for deliberately causing car crashes to make false insurance claims, the use of so-called "facial mapping" techniques demonstrates how police are turning to technology in the fight against insurance fraud.

No-one knows for sure how much Mohammed Patel made in total from his serial car crashing activities, which involved forcing crashes and then putting in huge bogus claims for damages.

Patel deliberately caused at least 93 car crashes in the Greater Manchester area in a three-year period, Manchester Crown Court heard.

But the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB), the industry body set up to tackle all types of insurance fraud, believes he may have been responsible for up to 400 crashes over three or four years.

Why rob a bank any more? It's a hell of a lot of money, it's the reason we want to do as much as we can to stop it Richard Davies, IFB 'Crash for cash' scam man jailed

Fraud in general is estimated to cost the industry £1.9bn a year in undetected bogus claims. That puts £44 on every insurance policy, from car to home contents, in the country.

The average "crash for cash" is worth £16,000, once a shopping list of bogus claims for damages, injuries, replacement vehicles and other such costs have been taken into account, according to the IFB.

As the IFB's Richard Davies puts it: "Why rob a bank any more? It's a hell of a lot of money, it's the reason we want to do as much as we can to stop it."

In Patel's case the work of facial mapping expert Richard Neave was central to stopping him.

Mr Neave is a forensic and medical artist at RN DS Partnership, a small Cheshire company which specialises in image comparison and facial reconstruction.

Mohammed Patel would brake suddenly causing other drivers to crash

Previously he has built Neanderthal men for television documentaries and created a model of the only unknown victim of the King's Cross fire in 1987, which led to Alexander Fallon finally being identified.

In this investigation the police supplied Mr Neave with a set of photographs which had been taken by onlookers at a series of the crashes.

From those he was able to isolate the image of the suspect, enlarge them to the same scale as each other, and show graphically how they had distinct similarities. The person responsible for each crash had the same hairstyle, ears, leg length and shoulder size, for example.

While Richard Neave himself is keen to point out none of this is conclusive evidence, he says the police described his work as "central" to their investigation.

Sergeant Mark Beales, who led the inquiry, agrees.

He said: "Without Richard Neave's evidence we couldn't have progressed further on with the investigation."

Cat and mouse

Patel's case is far from unique. According to the IFB, "crash for cash" has gone from being unheard of at the turn of the century to now being worth an estimated £350m a year.

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Richard Neave built up information about Patel from crash scene photos

Three of the top five areas for the crime are in north-west England, but the problem has spread across the country, with hotspots in the Midlands, Yorkshire and south-east England.

The use of facial mapping to help catch the car crashers may seem more associated with US crime dramas than commuter belt Manchester, but it is one way the police and the insurance industry are trying to stay a step ahead of the criminals.

The IFB accepts it is in a game of cat and mouse, but points out that it is now the second largest employer of investigators in the country, with access to 250 million insurance claims across the industry it can cross-reference and check.

Richard Davies boasts that fraudsters "will appear on a record somewhere and your records will be traced and you will have nowhere to hide."

But as the scale of the problem attests, while the industry and the police may have won the battle with Patel, the wider war against the car crashers goes on.