Fraud is rapidly increasing, was an early message given by senior police to the London Fraud Forum annual conference yesterday. Fraud is already the number one volume crime. Why then was the LFF gathering so hopeful, asks Mark Rowe.
Partly, for the sheer fact of gathering. LFF chair Robert Brooker opened the event at the Guildhall by saying fraud is at an absolute high; ‘we know that. That’s the reason we are here, that’s the reason we exist as the London Fraud Forum’, to bring public and private sector together; investigators, lawyers, people with data in their job title, ‘to fight the fight’ as Robert said. As he added, the day is for networking. Quite apart from making connections that may be useful, and to learn from sectors unrelated to yours, the sheer fact of being together shows a counter-fraud person is not on their own. In Robert’s words, ‘we’re in it together’.
By sharing data – whether between private industry and law enforcers, or between businesses – fraudsters can be countered, either brought to a judicial ‘outcome’ or disrupted, if not taken to court and imprisoned (the difference between the millions of estimated cases, and thousands of cases taken up by police, is painful; as a speaker last year at the LFF admitted, it’s not even the tip of the iceberg).
But as one police speaker said, ‘it’s doable’; Ruth Evans the chair of the two-year-old industry group Stop Scams UK gave the example of the (little advertised so far) 159 number, that you ring to report a suspicious call about a financial matter. The advice is, hang up, use another device, and dial 159,and it connects you to your bank. The next stage, she hopes, is that 159 becomes a mandatory number like 111. Another example of stopping fraudsters ‘upstream’ is blocking of URLs, through BT.
The LFF conference for years has been one of the premier events for airing what may be uncomfortable in private security more generally, such as the insider threat. Yesterday was also a reminder of just how varied the fraud threat is.
Part of the changing police approach to countering fraud, part of ‘choosing their battles’ is to share more information, and to share better. For example, the unglamorous sounding ‘fraud offender journey mapping’. Why draw up ‘journey maps’ of how a criminal or organised crime group moves into and does auction fraud, payment diversion, or investment, courier or romance frauds, to name only some of the fraud types? That way we can better understand the threat – the authorities can see what they’re doing well and what might need prioritising, and where the vulnerabilities might be.
If more than one of the police speakers insisted that they’re not going to arrest their way out of this; what else needs doing? Last but not least speaker was Jeremy Asher, Consultant Regulatory Solicitor, Setfords on his work to get counter fraud people into schools to educate sixth form students on the risks of fraud and how to protect themselves.
It was striking that the first speaker Angela McLaren, as the Commissioner of City of London Police the national lead against fraud (and business crime) singled out for praise Santander’s banking advert about ‘Scammer Time’ (instead of ‘Hammer Time’ to the tune of 1980s so bad it’s good song U Can’t Touch This by MC Hammer). The presenters Ant and Dec may have many good points, but not until now crime prevention. That did beg the question (one raised in past years at LFF conferences), what about a public service similar advert?
Besides such issues of public policy, what’s more intangible but useful are the personal connections, as raised by Robert Brooker when he introduced another authoritative speaker, Alex Rothwell, who became CEO of the NHS CFA (Counter Fraud Authority) a year ago. A former Met and City of London Police man, he was for some years a board member of the LFF. That sort of connection makes for an ease in human relations that is the difference between partnership work and data sharing to get things done – bad guys thwarted, public money saved – and the easy option of wearing blinkers and claims that you can’t cooperate because of ‘data protection’ and ‘GDPR’, as still heard, sadly.
