How artificial intelligence is spotting fake police reports Artificial intelligence can be used to determine with considerably accuracy whether a police report is fake or legit, a new […]

Artificial intelligence can be used to determine with considerably accuracy whether a police report is fake or legit, a new study finds.

Researchers have developed a computer tool that is able to successfully identify false robbery reports with 80 per cent accuracy by recognising patterns such as lack of detail, the language that is used and the items they claim have been stolen.

The tool has been developed in Spain using a combination of automatic text analysis and machine learning techniques and is now being used by Spanish police to help identify suspicious cases that warrant further investigation.

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Criminal offence

It is a criminal offence to make false robbery statements yet the practice is thought to be fairly common as people lodge seek to make money by lodging fake insurance claims.

An initial study of more than 1000 police reports from the Spanish National Police showed that the tool, known as VeriPol, was ‘extremely effective in discriminating between false and true reports’.

VeriPol identified a number of themes that were common amongst false robbery reports. These included shorter statements that were more focussed on the stolen property than the incident, a lack of precise detail about the incident itself and limited details of the attacker.

Lack of hard evidence

There also tended to be a lack of witnesses or other hard evidence, such as contacting a police officer or doctor straight after the incident.

“As an example, our model began to identify false statements where it was reported that incidents happened from behind or where the aggressors were wearing helmets,” said study co-author Jose Camacho-Collados, of Cardiff University.

“Other clear indicators of falsehood were descriptions of the type of objects stolen. References to iPhones and Samsung were associated with false claims, whereas bicycles and necklaces were correlated with true reports,” he added.

The study, published in the journal Knowledge-Based Systems, also involved researchers from Charles III University of Madrid.