Category Archives: International

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Worst Insurance Scam Artists

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From robbing their own store, to faked deaths, to slip-and-fall claims, to more gruesome crimes, scammers have gone to great lengths to collect insurance.

In the U.S. this amounts to about $40 billion per year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation—at a cost of $400 to $700 per year, per family, in increased premiums.

According to the U.S. Department of Financial Services, there were 377 arrests made for fraud in 2011; 356 in 2012 and the number dropped to 215 arrests in 2013.

Check out some of the more devious and intricate schemes here:

Graphic by Eamonn Freeman http://www.easylifecover.ie/

Home Depot Confirms Massive Data Breach

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Home Depot Data Breach

On Monday, Home Depot confirmed that a breach of its payment data systems may have exposed customer card data across the United States and Canada. The breach appears to have begun in April, allowing hackers to steal an untold amount of shopper information including credit card numbers.

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The home improvement giant disclosed on Sept. 2 that it was investigating reports of “unusual activity” and, a week later, determined that any customers who used a card in the U.S. or Canada is at risk, though the breach does not appear to impact shoppers online or at retail stores in Mexico. In an official statement, the company assured that no one would be held responsible for fraudulent charges and offered free identity protection services, including credit monitoring, to anyone who has shopped at one of its locations since April.

As with the massive Target data breach, the Home Depot news was first broken by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs. The data went up for sale on rescator. So, the same underground store that sold credit card information from the Target and P.

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F. Chang’s breaches, and may have been stolen by the same group of hackers. Krebs reported, “In what can only be interpreted as intended retribution for U.S. and European sanctions against Russia for its aggressive actions in Ukraine, this crime shop has named its newest batch of cards ‘American Sanctions.’ Stolen cards issued by European banks that were used in compromised U.S. store locations are being sold under a new batch of cards labeled ‘European Sanctions.'”

Given the five-month duration, this breach may be many times larger than the Target attack, which exposed 40 million credit and debit cards and the personal data of 70 million customers in three weeks. The Target breach led to the resignation of its CEO and cost the company almost $150 million in the second quarter alone, according to the New York Times. In fact, the toll may reach ever higher. “I don’t see how they’re getting out of this for under a billion, over time,” John Kindervag, the vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, told the Times, adding, “$150 million in a quarter seems almost like a bargain.” Beyond the company itself, Javelin Strategy and Research reported at the time that total damage to banks and retailers could surpass billion, and consumers could be liable for more than billion in uncovered losses and other costs.

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One of the most promising ways to increase point-of-sale security is through the adaptation of EMV chip technology, as discussed in the March issue of Risk Management. In Europe, 81% of cards have EMV chips, and countries that have adopted the technology saw sharp declines in credit card fraud. In England, for example, the amount of fraud per transaction has dropped 57% since 2002, while it has risen almost 70% in the United States over the same period, according to consulting firm Celent. As part of its breach response, Home Depot announced plans to escalate adoption of EMV, installing “chip and PIN” checkout terminals throughout its U.S. stores by the end of the year. Target made a similar move in April, saying that it will issue its branded REDcard credit, debit and co-branded credit cards with MasterCard chip technology beginning next year.

The Long-Term Economic Impact of Hurricanes

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Hurricane Damage in Joplin, Missouri

With the Northern Hemisphere now in the midst of hurricane, typhoon and cyclone season, many businesses have emergency plans in place, plywood to board the windows, and generators at the ready. But a new study from economists Solomon M. Hsiang of Berkeley and Amir S. Jina of Columbia, “The Causal Effect of Environmental Catastrophe on Long-Run Economic Growth,” found it is far more difficult for the overall economy to weather the storm.

As Rebecca J. Rosen explained in The Atlantic, economists previously had four competing hypotheses about the impact of destructive storms: “Such a disaster might permanently set a country back; it might temporarily derail growth only to get back on course down the road; it might lead to even greater growth, as new investment pours in to replace destroyed assets; or, possibly, it might get even better, not only stimulating growth but also ridding the country of whatever outdated infrastructure was holding it back.”

After looking at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes that occurred between 1950 and 2008 and the subsequent economic outcomes of the countries they struck, Hsiang and Jina were able to decisively strike down most of these hypotheses. “There is no creative destruction,” Jina said. “These disasters hit us and [their effects] sit around for a couple of decades.”

Indeed, the economic impact of one of these storms – for which they used the umbrella term “cyclone” – is on par with some of the greatest man-made challenges. According to the Atlantic:

A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with “a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened.” For a really bad storm (a magnitude you’d expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar “to losses from a banking crisis.” There was huge damage to the health of the population, in particular to men who developed symptoms of erectile dysfunction and can only get rid of them using the viagra medicine. The very worst storms—the top percentile—”have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks.

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“

Overall, “each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later,” the researchers found.

According to their data, the impacts of various caliber cyclones and similar man-made economic challenges are:

Hurricane economic impact

“Both rich and poor countries exhibit this response, with losses magnified in countries with less historical cyclone experience,” they wrote. “Income losses arise from a small but persistent suppression of annual growth rates spread across the fifteen years following disaster, generating large and significant cumulative effects: a 90th percentile event reduces per capita incomes by 7.4% two decades later, effectively undoing 3.7 years of average development.”

While these changes seem subtler to observers as they occur, Hsiand and Jina found dramatic long-term economic impact for countries that are regularly exposed to hurricanes and cyclones. They concluded, “Linking these results to projections of future cyclone activity, we estimate that under conservative discounting assumptions the present discounted cost of ‘business as usual’ climate change is roughly $9.7 trillion larger than previously thought.

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”

A Turbulent Year for the Aviation Industry, Despite Improving Safety

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MH 17 Wreckage Denis Kornilov / Shutterstock.com

First, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared in March, dominating the news cycle and baffling aviation experts, government officials and civilian observers alike. This month, three tragedies in short succession have kept the industry in the hot seat. Malaysia Airlines made headlines once again on July 17 after Flight MH 17, a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over Ukraine. It is now the seventh most deadly aviation crash in history. Exactly who fired on the plane remains unclear, as do many questions of insurance, as war has not officially been declared, despite months of fighting in the region. An act of war would exclude losses from insurance coverage, but remaining uncertainty does as well. Plus, “Unless Russia has declared war on Malaysia, that would knock out the exclusion,” RIMS Vice President Rick Roberts told Mashable. But for it to fall under under terrorism coverage, “someone has to certify that the act that occurred wasn’t a mistake—that it was a malicious act.” The already struggling company may not be able to survive this second disaster, or the reputational devastation.

Ten Deadliest Plane Crashes

Tragedy has further plagued the industry this month. On July 23, a TransAsia flight from Taiwan crashed, killing 48. The next day, an Air Algérie flight from Burkina Faso to Algeria disappeared less than an hour after takeoff in the air space over Mali. Approximately 24 hours later, peasants found the plane’s wreckage near Gao, Mali, and French soldiers dispatched to the scene were able to recover a black box, but no survivors.

Despite the string of disasters, there is no evidence that air travel is in any way more dangerous on the whole. In fact, it is safer than ever before. Nearly three billion people fly safely each year on more than 37 million flights, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) reports, and the global plane accident rate fell to the lowest level in aviation history in 2012. Over the past 10 years, both the crash and fatality rates have trended downward, according to statistics from the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives. But, little more than halfway into 2014, the number of people killed in plane crashes is more than double the total for 2013 (991 and 459, respectively).

Based on BAAA data:

Crashes per year

Deaths per year

Looking back even further, this chart from the Wall Street Journal leaves little doubt that the aviation industry has grown drastically safer:

Deadly flights

While 2014 has been more fatal thus far, the overall number of crashes continues to decrease. There have been 70 commercial-plane crashes globally so far, versus 81 for the comparable period a year earlier, according to Aviation Safety Network, part of the Flight Safety Foundation. Further, the four tragedies do not have any common root causes for their failures.

Insurance Changes on the Horizon

International carriers are feeling most of the strain, and that is likely to have serious implications for insurance premiums. “Given the accumulation of losses, including the loss of Asiana Airlines’ Boeing 777 in San Francisco last year, an explosion causing damage to 20 aircraft in Tripoli recently, and this week’s losses in Africa and Taiwan, these will, altogether, put pressure on the global insurance market,” said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute. “I expect most of the impact to be focused on international carriers, particularly those operating in or traversing parts of the world that I would characterize as ‘hotspots,’ currently experiencing military or political instability. That would certainly include Ukraine, parts of the Middle East, and parts of Africa.”

While the recent spate of tragedies may leave many travelers wary of getting on a plane, American airlines have less to worry about regarding premiums than their foreign counterparts. There have been are no notable losses this year among domestic carriers, or U.S.-based airlines that fly internationally. As Hartwig pointed out, however, “With a few exceptions, they do not tend to traverse many of those hotspots to begin with.”

In Africa and other developing regions, “you identify accidents in many places that would have happened 30 or 40 years ago in the West, because oversight is lagging,” Dominique Fouda, spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency, told the Wall Street Journal. “You also see different accidents linked to local conditions.”