The pandemic revealed a wasted decade in terms of countering fraud, according to a blunt report from the Fraud Advisory Panel, a charity, on Tuesday alongside its AGM.
The online document, titled ‘Running on Empty’ opened with the point that ‘fraudsters prosper when everyone else is on the back foot’. The greater the uncertainty, the easier fraudsters find it to take advantage. “The pandemic created an unprecedented confusion of unfamiliar ways to do familiar things – working, shopping, earning, caring, loving, living. And most of them had to happen right there, in the fraudsters’ playground – cyberspace. The dramatic consequences are visible everywhere.”
On covid and the UK Government’s hundreds of billions of pounds given to individuals and businesses during lockdown, the document complained of ‘so little due diligence and so much self-certification’; and ‘gaping fraud vulnerabilities’ at the heart of the support package (and particularly ‘bounce back’ loans). The AGM lecture was given by Lord Agnew of Alton, who resigned in January as a junior Treasury minister and set out first in the House of Lords the shortcomings of central Government in countering fraud.
More generally, the document argued that ‘the main problem facing a wealthy and prosperous country like the UK is not a shortage of potential resources with which to fight fraud but a shortage of political will. The speed of events since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 could barely have made that same point more eloquently. We welcome the overdue strengthening of the UK’s money laundering and anticorruption regulations – so long argued for by so many, and yet so frequently delayed.”
And as for victims, the document said that cyber crime is widely under-reported; and disproportionately harms people in the UK. To make online more secure for consumers, all social media platforms should be required to verify the identity of advertisers, the document argued. It called for dismantling of obstacles to counter-fraud data-sharing – legal, institutional, political and commercial; and financial education (including fraud awareness) in all schools.
On the Criminal Justice System (CJS) the document said that, like so much of the nation’s defences, it was on its knees long before the pandemic. “As we have said so often over the years, the CJS (in spite of all the hard work and goodwill it commands) is entirely unable to provide anything like a satisfactory criminal justice response to victims of fraud and cybercrime. But to say it again now feels almost redundant since that depressing fact is today true for every category of crime.”
As for local government, that will not be part of the recently-announced Public Sector Fraud Authority. The document stated that ‘councils’ counter-fraud capabilities have been hollowed out over the past decade, accelerated by the transfer of housing benefit investigators to DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] in 2014’. Where counter-fraud functions still exist, they largely fund themselves with recoveries and by selling services, the document added.
The 24-page document is available online. More in the August print edition of Professional Security magazine.
