EXAMINING OF THE POSSIBILITY OF FRAUD IN COMPUTER FORENSICS OF ROAD ACCIDENTS

Abstract

Immediately after a car accident, there is pressure to provide expert information about what exactly happened and why. What is reported in the media can affect the confidence of society in relation to the transportation or mechanical engineering, and it can also affect the amount of property damage and the question of criminal liability incurred as a result of this event. Car crashes in road traffic, due to their excessive presence and serious consequences to the overall traffic accidents, have become one of the most common cases of traffic accidents’ technical expertise, while in many of these cases, the fates of people depend on the findings obtained in accidents’ expertise. Most commonly, the expertise uses computer software for modeling vehicle collision pulse type, so, in this paper, the application that is based on this type of model will be used. To show the possible situations, four typical and realistic cases of traffic accidents were selected and it was pointed to possible gaps during the expertise, which made it possible for the expertise to be performed with unrealistic values of the input parameters and the same results of computer simulations which could be regarded as correct, i.e. acceptable, were obtained, as with realistic values. On this basis, the research results and findings which could be obtained in this work, will indirectly be related to other pulse type software. This paper should find out which information we really need immediately after the traffic accident and which conclusions the experts engaged in a dialogue with the media and other interested parties can provide. The paper shows that it is very difficult to give a full explanation of the accident because of the great uncertainties about the total or partial attempt to reconstruct the situation and the circumstances under which the traffic accidents occurred, especially in terms of responsibility for the observed damage. This paper aims to show which information can be obtained immediately after the accident and which conclusions the engaged experts can provide for the assessment and reconstruction the accident cause because of the uncertainty of the sequence of events. Regardless of the application of modern computer software given in the paper, the results show that, even when the high-precision analysis is carried out, there is a possibility of the expertise abuse because each estimate is necessarily related to the uncertainty in terms of the assessment of the situation, which creates the conditions for the possibility of experts’ abuse.