The UK’s work to counter fraud is including a lot of foreign travel.
That came out at the University of Portsmouth’s 14th annual counter-fraud conference, running on June 18 and 19, by the opening speaker, Fran Dowling, head of the fraud policy unit at the Home Office. Significantly, she was a diplomat for ten years, and has had a lot of bilateral meetings; for instance in Vienna in midsummer she had 14 ‘bilaterals’; and was recently in the Nigerian capital Abuja, for the Home Office agreement with the authorities there to counter fraud. Why? “Because answers to this are definitely international,” she said, as she set out the Government’s priorities, ahead of publication of a fraud strategy, probably at the end of the year or early in 2026.
She gave the latest indication of the forthcoming UK fraud strategy, trailed in recent months by the Home Office minister for countering fraud, Lord Hanson, due for publication late in 2025 or early in 2026. She was followed by a former Portsmouth MSc student Daniel Sibthorpe, who having taken a master’s degree in cyber-crime, counter fraud and corruption, is now director of forensic services at the accountancy firm Crowe, working on fraud and cyber-crime. His speaking continues the firm’s association with Portsmouth, now that Jim Gee has retired. Dan’s among speakers also on day two, on fraud faced by the social housing sector, alongside a related talk by Dr Janice Goldstraw-White, of Perpetuity Research, on fraud in the private rented sector.
The third speaker of the morning was Craig Jones, now of CyPol, from 2019 to 2024 director of cyber crime at the international police body Interpol, based in Singapore. He took the audience, online and in-person, on a tour of his 40-plus year career, from the Royal Navy to the police, to work in forensics, setting up Thames Valley Police’s cyber crime team, and heading the south east region cyber crime unit, meaning work on regional and national cases such as the 2017 Wannacry ransomware attack.
Other speakers over the two days, which bring together students and their teachers, practitioners and others in the field, from the UK and overseas, are due to include, to name only UK speakers, veteran academic Prof Michael Levi, of Cardiff University; Prof Nicholas Lord, Centre for Digital Trust and Society, University of Manchester; Charlotte Hogan, Money Laundering Reporting Officer, Isle of Man; and the criminologist Prof Mark Button, Director of the Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime which organises the conference, on ‘the online economy of refund fraud’. Dr Jack Whittaker, of the University of Surrey, is giving a case study of website developers who are ‘online shopping fraud enablers’; and Dr Ruth McAlister and Dr Fabian Campbell-West, of the consultancy Harod Associates will describe use of artificial intelligence (AI) for investigating and even predicting frauds.
For more about the conference, visit the university’s website.
More in the August 2025 edition of Professional Security Magazine.
