A Compendium of Fraud on STUMP
So many frauds -- plus some updates on a few
In this recent podcast post: April Awareness: Autism, Cancer, Finance, and Poetry, I mentioned I should re-run my posts on life insurance fraud, but then remembered… I have a lot of posts touching on fraud.
So why not link to them all here?
Okay, maybe not all, but let me organize them by theme.
Life Insurance-related Fraud
Let me start with the area I had been referring to: life insurance fraud. This takes a variety of forms, and there’s a less common type where the life insurer itself is fraudulent.
May 2022: Podcast episode: Fraudulent Life Insurers
In the above episode, I talk about one of my favorite life insurance frauds (fictional), written by Dickens… who had become friends with an actuary, and knew of the various financial shenanigans of the time (more on that in a bit). The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company! Ah, what an idea!
However, the podcast episode also includes the very real insurer fraud, which was a fraud against life reinsurers (and investors) — which is how most life insurance fraud from the insurer side goes. Policyholders don’t have enough money to defraud, usually — other, larger, insurers do.
Here’s a video from 2019 where I talk about the Anglo-Bengalee from Martin Chuzzlewit on its own:
May 2022: Podcast episode: Don’t sell insurance to the Mafia
Due to my day job, I get to read about insurance fraud all the time, but life insurance fraud isn’t as common… you have probably been hearing stuff about Medicaid or Medicare fraud, where services that have never been provided are billed to insurers or the government, and that’s a relatively straightforward fraud to understand.
Life insurance fraud can get grisly. Historically, yes, it can involve murder.
Hilariously, it can involve people faking their own deaths in bizarre ways.
There was one notorious case, bound up with the start of the medical examiner system in NYC (and one of the cases detailed in the book The Poisoner’s Handbook):
The story of the poisoning of Iron Mike Malloy is grimly amusing due to the lengths his “buddies” took to murdering him to get life insurance proceeds. They tried seven times before they were ultimately successful on the eighth time, using carbon monoxide poisoning to kill him, via a coal gas jet.
But the main question is: who the hell would underwrite a life insurance policy on such an obvious alcoholic? I want to know more about how they bought that policy.
Last, in this post:
I link to another podcast where they talk about insurance fraud, conducted within the insurance world, and I’ve heard/seen litigated (and yes, people go to prison for some of this):
It’s far more prosaic and depressing: insurance brokers stealing from their customers or embezzling from their businesses in general.
But they do talk about a serious situation — the deliberate stealing of customers’ premiums by brokers, who then end up with no insurance coverage. This has to do with property and casualty coverage (homeowners/auto for personal, and a variety of business insurance coverages).
The podcast episode is engaging, as they start talking about this fraud… and then end up talking about meth labs (ok, not for long).
I laughed grimly when some wondered how some of the folks they knew who perpetrated some of this fraud and embezzlement managed to keep it up for a certain amount of time (the certain amount of time was not necessarily that long), even though these people were not necessarily that smart or great with numbers.
It’s straight-up theft.
And yes, intermediaries will steal from you. Sorry. It’s unlikely that it will be the insurer itself.
Fraud and Fake Longevity
Now this is a delight, because murder is not involved… but lying about death (or birth) is.
I first came across this around 2010, so I had posted about it on the old Actuarial Outpost (no longer extant).
What happened was the “world’s oldest man” died (man, how I hate that keeps happening!), and therefore the title devolved to a man in Japan… who had actually been dead for decades. (Wikipedia tells the story differently, which may be the case, but this is how I remember it.)
What had been going on, of course, was pension fraud.
That is definitely the case — the family had hidden the death and had been collecting the pension for decades. Crazily enough, his wife had lived a very long life, to 101, but they also didn’t report her death (but didn’t hide the body?) because it sounds like benefits from her pension continued to be deposited into a bank account the family members accessed.
After this embarrassing episode, which the Japanese blamed on their politeness in not checking on whether superannuated seniors were actually alive, the Japanese did actually check whether a bunch of folks purportedly over the age of 100 were alive.
After the discovery of Kato's mummified corpse, other checks into elderly centenarians across Japan produced reports of missing centenarians and faulty recordkeeping. Tokyo officials attempted to find the oldest woman in the city, 113-year-old Fusa Furuya, who was registered as living with her daughter. Furuya's daughter said she had not seen her mother for over 25 years.[12] The revelations about the disappearance of Furuya and the death of Kato prompted a nationwide investigation, which concluded that police did not know if 234,354 people older than 100 were still alive.[13] More than 77,000 of these people, officials said, would have been older than 120 years old if they were still alive. Poor record keeping was blamed for many of the cases,[13] and officials said that many may have died during World War II. One register claimed a man was still alive at age 186.[14]
This may sound familiar, and yes, I will link to my posts on DOGE and Social Security in a moment.
The Wikipedia article itself has a bunch of harrowing items — seniors living alone with dementia, alienated from younger generations (or having no younger generations).
But the Wiki article got away from the original point: how many of the obviously dead people on their list were frauds? (As opposed to just poor record-keeping)
There can also be supposed “long life” because people weren’t born when they said they were, so they can start collecting on a pension earlier than they deserve (also, courtesy of poor record-keeping.)
There have been researchers looking in this phenomenon, where they have found the supposed “blue zone” of anomalous longevity in very poor places to be very well-explained by pension fraud.
Stories on STUMP (old and new) in this vein:
August 2019: Mortality with Meep: How to Get Lots of Supercentenarians? Pension fraud!
December 2019: Can the Government Tell If You’re Dead or Alive?
Jan 2024: Podcast — The Sentinel Effect, Centenarians, and Pension Fraud
Sept 2024: Podcast — Ig Nobel 2024 Winner: The Secret to Long Life is Lying About Your Age...Or Not Reporting Your Death
Feb 2025: Pension Watch January 2025: Private Equity Fees, Kentucky, Alternative Assets, and More — if you scroll down, there is a story about pension fraud in NY… it’s nothing special. DiNapoli puts out emails about these all the time.
DOGE and Social Security
I didn’t get into the full issue of Social Security number fraud. (Which yes, does exist)
I was mainly addressing a claim that supposedly “proved” fraud was going on.
Sorry, the supposed “proof” did not show that — this was a case of “know how the data was created.”
10 Feb 2025: On Social Security Old Age Benefits Fraud(?)
17 Feb 2025: Visualization of Social Security Fraud(?): A STUMP Geeking-Out Special
18 Feb 2025: A Potential Large Source of Junk SSA Data: The Pre-1972 Social Security Number Process
22 Mar 2025: DOGE: The Shot Across The Bow
It helps to know people sometimes. A friend told me what was going on, and where to look for documentation, so I did.
The problem is this:
The numbers Elon Musk pointed to as proving fraud did not prove fraud.
They did prove a messed-up database that needed cleaning.
They made a claim of great savings to Social Security if it were purged of fraud
Nope.
That said:
By the time the Social Security cuts come (for people like me, who are high-income) and tax increases come (again, for people like me), there had better be no systems running on COBOL and no SSN duplicates.
DOGE is not going scrape out trillions of dollars of savings from any of this. I assume they’re not that delusional (maybe they are, who knows).
But they probably do know that any major cuts that will have to come from Congress will only be made palatable if there is a system that works.
I don’t know what, if anything, they’ve done about the people who (legit) had duplicate SSNs because of the pre-1972 process, and the junk data they had never cleaned up before.
This stuff seems to have been pushed off the headlines by the Medicaid and Medicare fraud, which makes for a lot more compelling video content, eh?
Spreadsheets and Fraud
Spreadsheet best practice has been something I’ve championed for over 20 years within the actuarial community (and more broadly), and not only have I given talks at conferences on the topic, I used to teach an actuarial computing course at UConn where I got to yell at students about best practices.
So I always have a bit of a laugh when people get caught out in their frauds because of stupid spreadsheet use.
That is just one piece of an extremely dumb, fraudulent process I cover in this May 2022 podcast episode: Don’t perpetrate financial fraud in spreadsheets
It’s not just that he did it in a spreadsheet… it’s that he documented the whole dumbass fraudulent process in an email.
(yes, yes, “password protected”, but they got the info via discovery… and yeah, this stuff is easily crackable.)
Academic Fraud in a Spreadsheet
Then there was a whole academic fraud episode that was found out due to spreadsheets, the fallout of which is still precipitating, it seems.
Here are some of the posts/podcast episodes about what happened with some data sets, which was found out to be tampered with because of formatting in Excel.
23 Jun 2023: Podcast — Lying about lying - and why you shouldn't use Excel when you try to fake data
7 July 2023: Podcast — Lying about science
20 Aug 2023: Podcast — Seek and ye shall find… what?
There are a lot of stories in here, but I want to focus specifically on the Francesca Gino thread, and perhaps Dan Ariely, because I got sucked into their bogus auto insurance study (which is where their faked data was found via Excel formatting).
Gino got booted from Harvard, Gino sued Harvard and the Data Colada people who had pointed out that the data were iffy (not just the Excel spreadsheet issue, but there were other anomalies in other reports).
Here are updates from the Data Colada people:
8 May 2024: [116] Our (First?) Day In Court
12 June 2024: [117] The Impersonator: The Fake Data Were Coming From Inside the Lab
9 July 2024: [118] Harvard’s Gino Report Reveals How A Dataset Was Altered
In September 2024, Gino’s lawsuit against the Data Colada guys was dismissed:
Sept 2024, Science Advisor: Honesty researcher’s lawsuit against data sleuths dismissed
Judge rules that bloggers sued by Francesca Gino are protected by the First Amendment, but allows some claims against Harvard to proceed
A Massachusetts judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by honesty researcher Francesca Gino against three data sleuths who alleged that several of her publications contained falsified data.
Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), claimed that statements made by behavioral scientists Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons, and Uri Simonsohn on their blog, Data Colada, were “false and defamatory” and sought $25 million in damages. She also sued Harvard University and the dean of HBS, alleging defamation as well as gender discrimination, breach of contract, and other violations.
Data Colada and Harvard filed motions to dismiss the case, making their arguments in front of Massachusetts Judge Myong Joun in May.
In 2025, Harvard revoked Gino’s tenure and countersued:
May 2025, NBC News: What to know as Harvard professor Francesca Gino’s tenure is revoked amid data fraud investigation
For the first time in roughly 80 years, Harvard University has revoked the tenure of one of its professors.
The university revoked the tenure of Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, widely known for researching honesty and ethical behavior, a university spokesperson confirmed Monday.
Gino, 47, and her attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Gino was placed on administrative leave in 2023 after multiple allegations of falsifying data surfaced. She has long maintained that she did not commit academic fraud.'
Sept 2025, The Crimson: Harvard Sues Ex-HBS Professor Gino for Defamation, Accusing Her of Falsifying Evidence
Harvard sued behavioral scientist Francesca Gino for defamation in August, alleging the former Harvard Business School professor sent the school a falsified dataset to prove she did not commit data fraud.
The University’s lawyers accused Gino of modifying a spreadsheet on her laptop, then manually backdating it to 2010, so it would appear that she had been sent false data by another researcher rather than altered it herself.
As for Dan Ariely, one of the other prominent researchers involved in the research with the faked data, there were a few odd developments:
6 Feb 2026, Duke Chronicle: Duke shutters 3 research centers, including Dan Ariely’s Center for Advanced Hindsight
Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight run by Professor of Business Dan Ariely is set to close, Provost Alec Gallimore’s office announced Thursday.
The timing comes just one week after Ariely was named hundreds of times in connection with Jeffrey Epstein in the documents released last Friday through the Epstein Files Transparency Act. However, Duke has said the two are unrelated.
In the University’s Thursday press release, the decision is attributed to Duke’s ongoing strategic realignment and includes the sunset of two other centers — The Biodemography of Aging Research Unit and Center for Healthy Eating Research. A University spokesperson further said in a Friday email to The Chronicle that the decision was made in December.
31 Jan 2026, Duke Chronicle: Duke professor Dan Ariely had longstanding friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, newly released files show
2 Feb 2026, Duke Chronicle, by Dan Ariely: My connection with Jeffrey Epstein
I have a link about a journal looking into whether the data on an old paper of his was faked… but perhaps Ariely has other problems right now.
Leftover Fraud
In no particular order, the other pieces on fraud that I have not bundled by theme:
Nov 2022: Podcast — FTX, Dickens, and Business Fraud
Apr 2024: Podcast — What is Truth? The continuing saga of fraud and academic malpractice, in supposedly serious fields
Dec 2024: An Actual Murderer Among the Recently Commuted by Biden — yes, this is more life insurance fraud
Dec 2024: Revisiting Fraud & Embezzlement Episode: Rita Crundwell and Biden Commutation
Jun 2024: Podcast — Fraud and Embezzlement! How to Prevent and Detect
Oct 2024: Podcast — Research fraud, Alzheimer’s, and Mortality trends
Nov 2024: Podcast — Research Fraud Follow-Up: What Happened to Fraudsters and How to Make It Less Common
I may have missed some of my fraud posts, but oh well, them’s the breaks.
There is always some bright and shiny new fraud coming over the horizon to displace the previous ones, and I bet with the AI toys, we’ll get some doozies!