You may be thinking, isn’t fraud just fraud? Well, yes, technically it is. However, understanding the difference between soft fraud and hard fraud will help save your company a lot of money. In fact, not understanding soft fraud can actually cost your company a lot of money in the long run.

Technically, according to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, the definition of fraud is the “intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right.”   Hard fraud and soft fraud both contain the black letter definition of fraud.

To break the two concepts down into the simplest form possible, the best way to look at hard insurance fraud is that it is the intentional creation of a false scenario in order to collect an insurance settlement.

Soft fraud is much more dangerous to the insurance industry, because soft fraud is the intentional exaggeration of the extent of damage suffered under a legitimate insurance claim. These claims are much more difficult to investigate because they derive authority from legitimate claims. It is more difficult to recognize a claim as fraudulent if it looks like it is legitimate, just like it takes a little while to recognize that a wolf is not a regular dog, even though they belong to the same genome.

Hard fraud claims are 100% false in nature, whereas soft fraud claims are only fraudulent to the extent they malinger and exaggerate the extent of damage suffered under a legitimate claim.

It takes significant skill and training, like the skill and training possessed by the team at Capital Investigating, in order to determine if an ostensibly legitimate claim is being exaggerated under a fraudulent attempt to gain additional insurance money, which the actual damage suffered would not warrant.

If you need assistance investigating a suspected fraud claim, contact Mike Manni at