US Patent Issued to State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance on Feb. 18 for "Heuristic account fraud detection engine" (Illinois Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,229,816, issued on Feb. 18, was assigned to State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. (Bloomington, Ill.).

"Heuristic account fraud detection engine" was invented by Elizabeth A. Flowers (Bloomington, Ill.), Puneit Dua (Bloomington, Ill.), Eric Balota (Bloomington, Ill.) and Shanna L. Phillips (Bloomington, Ill.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A heuristic engine includes capabilities to collect an unstructured data set and detect instances of transaction fraud in a financial account. By providing a heuristic algorithm with unstructured transaction sets and indications of particular instances of transactions that correlate with past fraud...