The 8 characteristics of false reports

A summary of the characteristics of false reports, taken into account to detect them.

Not all reports received by police stations are true. On some occasions, complainants file such reports with the intention of receiving some kind of benefit by reporting that they have been the victim of a robbery or theft.

However, the extensive experience of the police combined with the existence of certain algorithmic programs that analyze the language of these types of reports can detect whether or not the complainant has lied.

As surprising as it may seem, false reports are detectable, something that should frighten anyone who wants to deceive police officers. In the following we are going to find out what are the characteristics of false reports, especially in terms of language.Don't stop reading if you want to find out!

There are keys to detecting false complaints

It is almost common sense that not all the denunciations that are interposed in police station or in the courts are true. A percentage of them are false reports, something that may be especially especially common for crimes such as theft, robbery and any other crime that involves some kind of short-term financial gain.. There are also false reports related to incidents that, if reported, may result in the collection of an insurance policy.

Filing a false report is, legally, the act of accusing a person of having committed an alleged crime before the corresponding authority, knowing that the content of the report is false or that it is known that the account expressed therein does not correspond to the truth. The denunciations, whether true or false, always bring with them the possibility of socially harming the person denounced, which is why if you are a victim of a false denunciation it is always advisable to report this crime.

That there are false reports is a reality, but what are the characteristics of false reports? What is it that characterizes a report so that it can be denounced as false? Finding out whether a report is false or not may seem like an exercise in cartomancy, but the truth is that it is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, we could say that those who lie when filing a complaint use a language of their ownIn fact, we could say that those who lie when filing a complaint use their own language, a series of expressions and grammatical constructions that give them away.

Despite what most may believe, the truth is that people lie in a similar way. When we are in front of a policeman, our account of how the theft we have invented happened is almost always the same. With the exception of the stolen object, everything else remains stable: ambiguity, unclear day on which the events occurred, and not being able to see who stole from us.

These are just some of the characteristics of false reports, aspects that have been algorithmically addressed by programs such as the one proposed by Miguel Camacho's group in 2018 called VeriPol, a powerful tool that can provide reliable data to establish whether the whistleblower's account is true or not. This program, together with the experience of police officers versed in years and years detecting the lie of those who file false reports, a series of common characteristics have been found in false reports concerning robberies and thefts.

Characteristics of false allegations

Most false reports have patterns in their language that are more or less obvious to the expert police officer, and more so to a sophisticated mathematical program.

For several years now detecting whether a report is true or not is no longer a mystery, and thanks to the development of powerful programs for the analysis of the grammar, syntax and semantics ofsyntax and semantics of robbery reports, it is possible to know how true is the story that the complainant has given us. Proof of this is that police experts detect almost 75% of false reports, and the aforementioned program reaches 91%.

1. Temporal ambiguity

One of those predictors that someone is lying when explaining what happened is the word "day". This word appears in false reports not because the robberies took place in broad daylight, but because the complainant uses very unspecific expressions of time such as "a few days ago", "one day ago", "a couple of days ago".

When you are a victim of a real crime, it is normal to remember clearly on what day it happened.This is evidenced in true reports by more specific expressions of time such as "yesterday", "Thursday", "Monday morning".... The ambiguity of when the events took place is a characteristic pattern of false allegations.

2. Robbery from behind

Another of the expressions that usually appears in this type of reports is that the "robbery occurred from behind" and the like. The complainant was the victim of a crime from behind, in the form of a bag being pulled or a backpack being opened, without the complainant having time to see it.

Fake robberies often happen from behind because it saves the complainant from having to give detailsThe words "tug", "shoulder", "from the backpack", "back" can serve as red flags. Words like "tug", "shoulder", "from the backpack", "back" can serve as red flags.

3. Thief well covered

In false reports of theft and robbery, the offender looks like the bad guy in a movie. He is often referred to as a person wearing a helmet and dressed in black, as bad guys always wear black.. In this type of denunciation the thief is usually well covered, as if he were going to rob a bank or was taken from the cast of The Paper House.

4. Object-centered

Regardless of what has been stolen, being a victim of a crime is a traumatic experience that we inevitably remember as a bad experience. If something of value has been stolen, it is clear that we will remember it, but the act itself is remembered in a particularly intense way.

The descriptions in false reports do not focus on the facts but on the object.. The most frequently mentioned words in this type of report are directly related to the economic value of the stolen object, such as "insurance", "company" and "contract".

In addition, it often happens that the brand of the stolen device is expensive, something that can attract special attention if the complainant has a rather low purchasing power, which is why words such as "Apple" or "iPhone" are found.

5. Distance from the complainant's home

One of the most curious characteristics of false reports is that the closer it occurs to the complainant's home, the more likely it is to be true, unless it happened in the complainant's own home.

A report that specifies that the events occurred close to the victim's home, with expressions such as "in the doorway of the house", is more likely to be true.

On the other hand, those who file false reports are more likely to be truthful, those who file false reports tend to place the events far from their home, away from their acquaintancesfar from acquaintances such as neighbors who could confirm to the police that the person is lying.

6. Syntactic and grammatical aspects.

The grammatical and syntactic resources of the complaint can also indicate whether it is false or not.. It seems that personal and demonstrative pronouns (I, he, they, that one, that one...) and even the verbs "to be" and "to be" appear in greater proportion in true reports. In the false ones, on the other hand, the complainants are not very prone to concretize using specific pronouns such as "I", "he", "this", "that"....

The syntax also gives away. Syntagms introduced by the adverb "barely" ("I could barely see him", "I barely remember") usually indicate falsity. A high number of negations is also related to lying, with phrases such as "I cannot give more data", "I have not been injured", "I could not see him", "I did not recognize him"...

7. Background in action

True allegations focus on the background in action, while false allegations focus on describing objects, which is the only thing the complainant has seen. In the real ones, words related to specific qualities and actions appear in greater proportion, such as "face", "hair", "beard", "age", "man".such as "face", "hair", "beard", "age", "man"... words that specify what the person who committed the crime was like and the specific situation in which the events took place.

8. Extent of the complaint

False reports tend to be shorter, although this should not be interpreted as an indication of the length of the report.However, this should not be interpreted as meaning that every brief expression of something is necessarily false. One thing are the denunciations in a judicial context and another, very different, are the opinions interposed in the comments page of a page of a restaurant or a hotel. Brevity is not a feature of all lies, but it must be contextualized.

Final reflection

All these characteristic features of false allegations do not in themselves constitute falsehood. It is their combination and persistence among the total number of words that indicate the probability that the fact reported by someone is false. It should also be said that it is difficult to expose all the characteristics of false reports and, even if they are known, they are not going to save anyone from not having their report identified as false by a well-trained police officer.

Bearing in mind that false reports constitute a crime and that the police have powerful tools to detect them, it is better to think twice before trying to slip it to the officers.