A Fraudulent Conundrum

I saw a billboard today offering a $25,000 reward for reporting insurance fraud.* That got me thinking, obviously insurance fraud is a fairly commonplace crime (feel free to do your own research if you wish; you can start at www.insurancefraud.org), but, for $25,000, I'm sure there are people out there who've contemplated insurance fraud reporting fraud. In fact, I'm confident that there have been people who have actually committed insurance fraud reporting fraud, possibly even pocketing the $25,000. My searches for "insurance fraud reporting fraud" and "reporting insurance fraud fraud" didn't really turn up much, so as far as I can tell, there is not research as of yet on the amount of insurance fraud reporting fraud that goes on in this country (in either English or Spanish), so I am using my bully pulpit (I'm not sure whether or not a blog counts as a bully pulpit or not. Probably not, but whatever.) to call for a study. I can only imagine how much we, as Americans, are forced to pay each year due to people reporting fraudulent insurance fraud.

What is even scarier, however, is that we run into a slippery slope of sorts, or a Gordian knot, (or some other intellectually frightening moniker in that vein) in that if we create hotline with rewards with which to report insurance fraud reporting fraud, the frauders will simply move one layer deeper, moving on to insurance fraud reporting fraud reporting fraud and so on and so forth. You can see the problem here. I've seen it and I'm not sure what to do about it. Whatever, I'm sure good old American ambivalence (or NegativeMode ambivalence, if those two are not, indeed, mutually exclusive) will prevail.

* I can't be 100% certain that this is what the billboard actually said, as it was in Spanish, but I'm fairly certain based on my limited Spanish skillz and the picture in the ad. I guess I could be wrong, and it could have been an ad for a $25,000 car that has been in an accident, but I doubt that.

Completely Unrelated Topic: I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but whenever you run spellcheck in Blogger and your post contains the work "blog," the spellchecker highlights "blog" and instead suggests "bloc." Apparently, the word "blog" is not recognized by the Blogger spellchecker. That, my friends, is silly, ridiculous, and ironic.