Deterrence messaging is a cheap and easy way to do something against fraud, the opening morning of the two-day 15th counter fraud conference at the University of Portsmouth heard.
That was from one of the speakers, Prof Yaniv Hanock of the University of Wolverhampton. Such messaging could apply in government as in banking, to reduce fraudulent applications. He told the event that he was under no illusions; messaging (to query if something online is suspicious) will make a ‘dent’ in fraud, which as it’s in the billions, would be a lot of money. Deterrence messaging, as he put it, would be another layer in fraud prevention rather than the sole solution/
The following speakers were from the SCAN (Strengthen Counter Fraud across the NHS) who are academic researchers from the University of Manchester, and Northumbria, with the National institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR, funded by the Department of Health and Social Care). The research, described by the criminologist Nick Lord as a ‘work in progress’, includes a survey and interviews. The part of the work described by him and Dr Diana Bociga covered local counter-fraud specialists. Among the findings so far: proactive and preventative work is felt by such specialists to be the most valued part of the job; yet it’s the hardest to defend, because preventative work is difficult to quantify and is invisible to decision-makers. A question posed by Nick Lord was – regardless of whether specialists are directly employed by the NHS, by a not for profit, or a private contractor – what are NHS organisations willing to invest. The researchers have pointed to some ‘strategic gap’ between the specialists and the NHS’ central Counter Fraud Authority, which has estimated fraud against the NHS costs £1.3 billion a year, or about 0.7 per cent of its spend.
More in the August 2026 edition of Professional Security Magazine.
As begun due to covid, the conference is in-person and allowing free access over Microsoft Teams. Like previous years, the conference has an international flavour, real world and cyber; with numerous speakers from abroad; opening the event was Andrei Skorobogatov, of the Global Anti Scam Alliance, detailing the policy landscape. Speakers are academics or practitioners and ‘pracademics’ straddling theory and practice alike such as Dr Peter Tickner, speaking on day one about ‘Myriad Failures of Motivational Theory to Provide a Comprehensive Framework to Explain Why Fraudsters Commit Frauds’.
Background
Portsmouth is one of the premier universities in the UK for teaching and researching of fraud and private security more generally; in May a ‘Mapping the Online Economy of Refund Fraud’ report. was released by the fraud prevention trade body Cifas; Prof Mark Button, pictured, co-Director of the Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime at Portsmouth was one of the report’s contributors.
For details of the speakers visit https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/events/15th-international-counter-fraud-cybercrime-and-forensic-accounting-conference.
