Today’s fraud schemes are more advanced and complex than ever, putting billions in taxpayer dollars at risk. At the forefront of fraud, waste, and abuse detection, Peraton’s Rapid Fraud Intelligence (Rapid FI) is transforming how agencies identify and mitigate threats at the federal level. Senior Director of Technology Program Management, Lauren Toth, explains how Rapid FI continues to push boundaries while delivering results.
What is Rapid FI, and what problem does it solve for federal agencies?
Rapid FI is a scalable, modular, and rapidly deployable system built upon decades of engineering and investigative experience combating fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA). Our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) work with each customer to tailor Rapid FI’s toolset, user interface, and user workflows to best support each unique FWA use case. Rapid FI employs AI/ML models to flag suspicious behavior and assign the entity in question a risk score that helps users prioritize which cases to investigate first, maximizing return on investment.
Effective fraud defense requires more than just an operational model. Rapid FI is different from other solutions because it was built by investigators, for investigators. Our seasoned engineering team has deployed Rapid FI solutions multiple times, often within 30 days or less. Furthermore, Rapid FI’s infrastructure is tailored for each use case because one solution doesn’t fit all. Some agencies may only need one or two models and a weekly fraud report; others may need many models with associated workflows, user interfaces, and custom reports. As needs grow, Rapid FI can scale accordingly.
Through the right combination of people, expertise, models, and rapidly deployable bespoke implementation, Rapid FI is designed to be faster and smarter than fraud so taxpayer dollars can be spent on their intended purposes.
How does Rapid FI use AI/ML and real-time analytics to detect and prevent fraud?
- Real-time Detection: With live data streams (transactions, user behavior, activity logs, verification data, etc.) Rapid FI can analyze anomalies as they occur, using AI/ML models to immediately identify irregular or fraudulent activities. Deviations from normal patterns trigger real-time alerts or decisions.
- Diverse AI/ML Models: The platform supports the deployment of various AI/ML models including Time-Series Models, Anomaly Detection Models, Classification Models, and Neural Network Models, which are trained to identify fraudulent patterns.
- Continuous Model Improvement: Batch analytics on historical data allow for the identification of evolving fraud patterns and trends, which then inform the continual improvement and retraining of the AI/ML models for enhanced accuracy. This adaptability allows Rapid FI to learn and detect evolving fraud tactics.
- Foundation Model Integration: Rapid FI can integrate broader functioning Foundation Models (LLMs, Vision models, Multimodal models, Audio models, etc.), leveraging their ability to distill unstructured data (e.g. text, image based-documents, PDFs, audio, etc.) into datapoints that can be analyzed and finally used to detect fraud indicators.
- Large-Scale Decision making: Rapid FI can process large volumes of data with scalable data storage, data ingestion pipelines, distributed data processing, and robust ML Operations (MLOps) processes. This allows for in-depth investigations and reporting that power data-driven decisions at scale.
Can you share a real-world or simulated example of how Rapid FI stopped fraud in action?
Rapid FI can address simple and complex fraud schemes. One simple fraud scheme our Rapid FI solution detects within medical fraud is providers who submit claims with a date of service that occurred after a patient’s date of death. More complex models include analysis of billing patterns for anomalous behavior and suspicious connections between providers via shared beneficiaries, which can indicate kick-back and/or identity theft fraud schemes.
What makes Rapid FI different from traditional fraud detection tools?
Traditional fraud detection tools lack the engineering and investigative expertise behind the solution. Often, models are developed by data scientists who do not contextually understand the underlying data, resulting in model output that overlooks hard-to-detect fraud schemes or that erroneously flags legitimate activity as suspicious. This can waste time and resources because an investigator may be led down a path with a dead end.
Also, Rapid FI’s models are built to alert early, not often, thus reducing “alert noise.” For example, a model that flags the same entity as suspicious every day for a month does not provide additional information to the user than if it just flags that entity once; repeat alerts flood the system and can make finding other suspicious entities difficult, akin to finding a needle in a haystack. This increases the time it takes an investigator to identify a viable lead.
Peraton’s SMEs ensure each Rapid FI implementation is targeted to the desired use case and tailored for the fraud schemes occurring within each agency. Rapid FI’s tailored workflows also increase user efficiency through customized reports and user interfaces that provide all the data a user needs to complete their tasks in one place.
How does Rapid FI empower analysts and decision-makers to act faster and smarter?
Peraton ensures Rapid FI’s models are explainable in layman’s terms and can be upheld in court. If law enforcement cannot explain to a jury why a model flagged an entity for investigation, the case may be thrown out due to lack of probable cause.
Combined with robust reporting tools, data, visualizations, and workflows, explainable models provide clear, actionable intelligence with a high rate of successful investigative outcomes.
By automating the detection of known and emerging fraud patterns, Rapid FI frees up analysts from manual, time-consuming tasks. This allows them to focus their expertise on complex cases that require human judgement, further investigation, and strategic planning, making their efforts more impactful.
Read more about Rapid FI’s proven efficiency in helping save billions in taxpayer dollars and discover how Peraton continues to help federal customers move faster than fraud.
Rapid FI
