Ideally, insurance fraud occurs when a person or entity makes false insurance claims in order to obtain compensation or benefits from an insurance company to which they are not entitled ( Power, & Power, 2015) . Insurance fraud is usually a scheme that can be perpetrated by both insurance company employees and claimants. Insurance frauds are diverse and occur in all areas of insurance, thus, costing insurance companies billions of dollars annually.
Despite insurance fraud being an offense punishable by law, people are continuously engaging in the fraud as they deem it perfectly acceptable and not a real crime ( Power, & Power, 2015) . However, committing other petty forms of crime such as stealing from a retail store is considered to be more serious and unacceptable by the criminal justice system a fact that has instigated massive growth in defrauding of the insurance companies. Currently, people are engaging in insurance fraud as it is so easy to perpetrate and there is very little chance for them to be caught than shoplifting in a retail store ( Power, & Power, 2015) . Therefore, gang members have embarked on committing insurance fraud so that they can move out of the dangerous fields of robbery in retail stores where if not killed by the convenience store operator, they will surely be hunted and eventually prosecuted.
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The major difference between committing an insurance fraud and stealing from a retail store is that police and prosecutors in most cases tend to ignore people who commit a white-collar crime such as insurance fraud and concentrate more on other forms of crimes such as direct stealing from a retail store. Normally, police officers, prosecutors, and judges believe that an insurance company cannot be a victim of crime ( Power, & Power, 2015) . Another difference between these two crimes is that insurers are required by statute to fund local police agencies and prosecutors to conduct the entire investigation after which the prosecutor will review the materials, and in most cases, they refuse to prosecute the fraudsters for lack of enough evidence.
References
Power, D. J., & Power, M. L. (2015, May). Sharing and Analyzing Data to Reduce Insurance Fraud. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual MWAIS Conference (MWAIS 2015), Pittsburg, KS, USA .
