VIEWAPP: What Traps Await the Insurer Without Digital Inspection Technology

Digital inspection seems like a simple solution: an agent or field specialist conducts an inspection using a smartphone and transmits the materials to the insurance company; the policyholder independently records the condition of the vehicle or property instead of a site visit.

A smartphone by itself does not make a photograph evidence of an inspection. If the technology does not control when, where, and under what scenario the photo was taken, the insurer is still forced to trust the participants in the process and risks incurring losses instead of savings.

In negotiations with various insurance companies where the inspection function falls under the responsibility of agents, the "holes" through which the quality of the inspection, the reliability of the data obtained, and the insurer's own control over the process can easily fall through are clearly visible.

Let us take a closer look at exactly what insurers may face.

Trap No. 1. The Gap Between the Inspection and Its Result

If an inspection is conducted by an agent, photographs are usually taken directly during the meeting with the client. The problem here is what happens to the materials after shooting.

In the scheme described during the meeting with the insurer, the agent photographs the object on a smartphone, after which the photographs remain on the agent's phone. They then need to be found, transferred to the automated information system (AIS), and attached to a specific contract. As a result, a time gap arises between the actual inspection and the appearance of its results in the information system. At the meeting, this was described quite simply: the photographs are with the agent, but the agent may not have had time yet to attach them to the contract.

For one inspection, this seems like an ordinary organizational inconvenience. With a large number of contracts, this turns into constant manual work and creates a delay between the inspection and the appearance of its results in the AIS.

In VIEWAPP, this gap can be eliminated: materials are generated directly in the application, and the inspection results are transmitted to the insurer's information system upon completion. The agent does not need to separately transfer photographs from the phone and attach them to the contract.

Trap No. 2. Leaving the Quality of the Inspection to the Agent's Discretion

In the agency model, the insurer delegates to the person not only a technical task — to take photographs — but also, in effect, part of the control over how exactly the inspection will be conducted.

If the process is not standardized and not technologically protected, the result depends on the particular agent: what angles they choose, what they photograph, and how carefully they perform all the actions required by the regulations.

A well-designed technology allows control to be transferred from the person to the system: to set a mandatory sequence of actions, define the required photographs and data, monitor the completion of each step, and record deviations.

And what happens when the insurer wants to go further and start saving on site visits?

At this point, the next model emerges — to delegate the inspection to the policyholder themselves.

The economic effect of this approach is much higher: there is no need to send an agent to every client, and the policyholder can conduct the inspection independently at a convenient time. But along with the savings, the set of risks also changes.

In the agency model, the insurer at least delegates the inspection to its own representative. In the case of self-inspection, the entire process is carried out by the policyholder themselves, and the insurer can no longer rely on the physical presence of its employee.

But along with the delegation of the inspection to the policyholder, the nature of fraud also changes. While the agency model allows for collusion between the client and the agent, with self-inspection, attempts to circumvent controls can occur directly through the technology.

During a recent meeting with an insurer from the Republic of Belarus, in response to a question about fraud, the following was literally said: "Well, these are people, they always try to do something somehow." Let us examine the traps in self-inspections by policyholders.

Trap No. 1. Old Photographs Instead of a Current Inspection

The most obvious risk is the ability to upload to the system photographs that are already stored on the phone.

In practice, this may look completely harmless: the client does have photographs of the vehicle taken recently. They simply select them from the gallery and send them to the insurer. But the system can no longer confirm when and where these images were taken and whether they correspond to the current condition of the vehicle.

For the insurance company, this means losing control over one of the key parameters of the inspection — its timeliness. This creates a high risk of accepting for insurance a vehicle that is already damaged or settling a loss that did not actually exist at the time of the insured event.

In VIEWAPP, photographs are created directly in the application — it is impossible to upload a ready-made image from the gallery. This allows control over the very moment of shooting and eliminates the use of pre-existing photographs within the framework of the inspection.

If digital inspection is to replace a meeting with an agent, the technology must compensate for the absence of a person on site. Otherwise, the insurer effectively receives photographs without proper confirmation of the circumstances under which they were created.

Trap No. 2. Geolocation Spoofing

The requirement to enable geolocation by itself does not yet mean that the coordinates can be trusted.

If the system does not control the reliability of the coordinates, it is potentially possible to create a situation where a photograph appears as if the object was shot at the correct address, while the person was actually in a different location.

In a secure technology, any attempt to spoof coordinates should become a separate anomaly, rather than remaining unnoticed by the insurer. VIEWAPP alerts the expert when coordinate spoofing is detected. At the same time, the system allows viewing the user's route and the points at which the shooting was performed.

For property insurance, this is especially important: it is not enough to get a photograph of a house. It is necessary to understand that it was the insured property that was photographed, and not a similar house or a neighboring plot.

Trap No. 3. Screen Shooting Instead of the Actual Object

After protection against geolocation spoofing appears, the next level of circumvention arises: to arrive at the correct location, but photograph not the vehicle or house, but an image of the object displayed on the screen of another device.

Outwardly, such a photograph may look quite convincing. However, the insurer again receives not the result of a real inspection, but an image whose origin cannot be verified by ordinary means.

Therefore, the protection of a digital inspection cannot be limited to GPS. In VIEWAPP, a proprietary model is used to detect such schemes, which analyzes signs of screen shooting, including image features and data collected by the device during photographing.

Trap No. 4. File Substitution Within the Application

An even more complex situation arises when the user attempts to bypass restrictions directly at the application level.

If the system simply accepts a file, it may be possible to convince it that the uploaded photograph was taken within the framework of a specific inspection step. But if the application simultaneously records shooting events, metadata, and checksums, it becomes possible to verify the consistency of these data.

During actual shooting, the information matches. When attempting to separately upload a file or interfere with the process, the data may diverge.

This is precisely why a secure digital inspection is not just a mobile camera with a form. It is a system that must control the very moment of evidence creation.

In both models, the problem is the same — the insurer may lose control over the inspection, but this happens in different ways. When working through agents, control is diffused between the agent, their smartphone, and the information system. When the inspection is delegated to the policyholder, technological risks emerge: substitution of photographs, coordinates, files, and the shooting process itself.

VIEWAPP makes it possible to structure a digital inspection so that control is maintained throughout the entire path — from performing a specific step and creating a photograph to transmitting the result to the insurance system. It is a technology that closes the weak points of the entire inspection process — from the moment of shooting to the transmission of the result to the insurance system. Only in this case does digitalization truly reduce costs rather than create new risks for the insurer.