UK police response to fraud is hampered by a lack of resources; a mainly local response to a cross-border crime; lack of an ability to identify harm and serious offences; lack of skills; too much focus on arrests and prosecutions; and lack of insight from data. That’s among the arguments in a report by the charity the Police Foundation on fraud. Over the next two spending reviews, the country needs ‘to significantly increase its investment in tackling fraud, cyber and economic crime’, according to the report.
Among its recommendations, it suggests that private companies should be legally required to share data relevant to the prevention and investigation of fraud; because while the private sector possesses vast amounts of data that contain vital fraud intelligence, and the UK has seen some progress on data sharing, particularly by the banks with the police, ‘there is still a challenge of encouraging private companies to share data with each other’. Public and private sector data should be brought together in a new National Anti-Fraud Data Centre, the 28-page report says. It calls for stronger ‘Regional Economic Crime Hubs’, that should bring in ‘a range of enforcement and regulatory bodies and the private sector’.
The document sets out how thanks to the internet, fraudsters are ‘now able to perpetrate scams on an industrial scale’; and notes that attempted scams by email and phone calls ‘have become part of the ‘background noise’ of everyday life’. The report acknowledges that most work to counter fraud takes place in the private sector; in financial institutions, telecoms companies and in cyber-security. “Tackling fraud requires extensive collaboration between law enforcement and the private sector,” according to the report. It points to data analytics developed by IBM; and Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. On skills, as it’s hard for the police to compete with the private sector on pay, the report suggests ‘innovative partnerships with the private sector, such as through an expanded cyber specials programme, which can bring in private sector expertise to work on investigations’, and operations.
Foreword
In a foreword to the document, Lutz Schüler, Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Media O2 (which commissioned the report) argues that police do not lack the willingness or ambition to tackle fraud. “Rather, they are constrained by a system created in a different era to fight a crime that has evolved beyond recognition.” He says that tackling fraud does not fall entirely to the police. He writes: “Businesses, like ours, have a vital role to play in preventing fraud. Over the last two years, our investments have helped block more than 168 million scam text messages from ever reaching customers’ phones, and we flag more than 50 million scam and spam calls every month. But the data shows that we simply can’t build our walls high enough – prevention is only part of the solution. It’s clear that urgent action is needed to end this fraud epidemic and prevent it from becoming a crime without consequence.”
Conclusion
The report concludes that while money is tight, ‘we need more officers doing more investigations, more proactive operations making life more difficult for those perpetrating fraud and more justice and support for victims’.
To freely download the report, visit the Police Foundation website.
