In this chapter:

News Resources

Newsgroups

News Resources

Using News in Investigations

The news information is great open source intelligence for disability insurance fraud investigators for two key reasons: 

 First, news entities including papers, radio programs, and television broadcast transcripts are rapidly becoming available online.  There are various news aggregators that allow searching of archives and many news entities post searchable articles or archives on their own website.  While some are free, many allow a free search and annotated result list, but require users to pay for the full text of the article.

Second, the fact that the information is available online may not be known to the claimant.  When a person’s name appears in a local newspaper, he or she may be unaware that the articles in that newspaper are posted on the Internet.  Also, because people may assume limited geographic distribution of the information in a local newspaper, they may submit items like letters to the editor or place classified ads assuming only local residents will see the information, not realizing that insurance investigators have access to the same items.

Newspaper articles may have information on community groups or organizations that the claimant may be involved with.  Community group activity calendars can be useful for planning surveillance or unannounced visits or interviews.  Advertisements, both in the classified section and paid advertising may indicate business activity.  Obituaries obviously may indicate the death of an insured.  Photos or video of the claimant may be available and useful for identification purposes.  Occasionally, investigators might uncover an article indicating that the claimant was involved in past insurance fraud schemes!

Accessing News Resources

LexisNexis maintains an extensive full-text news archive which is searchable for a fee.   NewsIndex, Newspapers.com, and ELibrary offer aggregated news archive searches.  In many cases, archives are only searchable by visiting the website of an individual newspaper.  A variety of tools are available to help investigators locate the daily, weekly, or monthly newspapers in various regions.  These include NewsLink.org, NewsDirectory, and NewsVoyager.  The Internet Public Library news section is a good resource for international newspaper websites.

For electronic media, some sites offers searches of transcripts.  Transcripts.TV for example, offers the purchase of ABC News transcripts for a small fee.  CNN makes recent transcripts available for free.  Some radio stations or programs may have their own websites and can offer downloadable clips of segments or may be simulcast online.  SpeechBot, from HP Invent, offers a free search of selected radio broadcasts, transcribed via voice recognition.

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Newsgroups

Newsgroup Basics

Newsgroups are entirely different than the news resources discussed above.  Newsgroups can be defined as a continuous public discussion about a certain topic (Tyson, N.D.).  Sometimes referred to by the original moniker "Usenet News," they allow typed communication through an electronic medium.  Unlike e-mail which is usually a one-to-one correspondence, Newsgroups are many-to-many.  Essentially, Newsgroups act like electronic bulletin boards where users can post messages and all other users can read and post replies to these messages.  The Newsgroups are arranged by category and some of the common categories are:

ALT         Alternative
BIZ          Business
COMP    Computer
NEWS    News about Usenet
REC        Recreation
SCI          Science
TALK       Discussion about controversial topics
MISC       Miscellaneous

Each of these categories is broken down into sub-categories.  The names of categories are separated by periods, much like an internet address.  For example, the Newsgroup containing announcements about new users of Usenet would be news.announce.newusers

The Alternative category is known for its eclectic nature.  Most categories require a voting process in order to create a new sub-category or group.  Contrastingly, the Alternative category allows anyone to create a new group (Tyson, N.D.).

Confused about what the differences are between email, chat, newsgroups, listservs, and various other discussion mediums?  HowStuffWorks explains the differences among these forms of communication.

Accessing Newsgroups

There is a Newsgroup category for practically every subject imaginable.  People use Newsgroups for a variety of reasons including getting information, answers to questions, discussion of interesting or controversial topics, advertising, and so on.  The attraction to Newsgroups for many users is that anonymity is possible.  By setting up a free user account with a non-descript username, an individual can read and post messages without divulging his or her identity.  Although some users take advantage of the opportunity for anonymity, many people do use individually identifiable information like names or addresses in their Newsgroup postings.

Historically, Newsgroups have been an area where anything goes.  In other words, people are often willing to divulge information in a Newsgroup that they would not otherwise make public knowledge.  Using the search feature provided by the Newsgroups, an investigator can search for any term that might appear in the text of a posting.  Suggested searches might be claimant’s name, claimant’s email address, “insurance fraud,” “disability fraud,” or the name of the insurance company.

Newsgroups can be accessed via Web browser with Google Groups.  Investigators are encouraged to use the search feature rather than browsing through the endless lists of postings in each of the categories.  Refer to Google Groups Help which includes a basic overview of Newsgroups and a glossary of terms that are helpful to new users.

In addition to searching Newsgroups as part of an investigation, researchers can review them for valuable investigative tips and even post or exchange information.  Keep in mind however, that Newsgroups are a public forum.

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Proceed to Chapter 7: Records Research