In his first public speech as Director General of the National Crime Agency, Graeme Biggar launched the NCA’s National Strategic Assessment. He said that the threat to the UK from serious and organised crime [SOC] continues to evolve and worryingly, in several areas, to grow; and that ‘serious and organised crime causes more harm, to more people, more often, than any other national security threat’.
He said: “Its impact can be seen in communities across the UK, with families ruined by drugs – by addiction, and the violence and crime it drives; young lives cut short by overdoses and gun crime, and appalling deaths at the hands of people smugglers who do not care if the migrants they are transporting live or die; childhoods scarred by sexual abuse and constant re-victimisation as images and videos are shared by offenders online; people having their life savings stolen from them through online fraud or cyber attacks.”
In financial terms, the NCA assesses that £12 billion in criminal cash is generated in the UK every year, and that in total more than £100 billion of the proceeds of British and (largely) global crime is laundered through the UK or UK corporate structures each year. In his speech Mr Biggar ranged over organised immigration crime; illegal drugs; use of firearms; fraud; ransomware; child sexual abuse; money laundering, of the proceeds of crime; and professional services that enable such crimes.
On fraud, he said that losses by individuals and businesses remained high and indeed rose last year. “The internet has enabled fraud to be undertaken at scale, anonymously, and from overseas. We assess that 75 per cent of fraud is partially or fully committed from overseas. Generative AI is also being used to make frauds more believable, through the use of ever better deep fake videos and Chat GPT to write more compelling phishing emails.”
He described some of the ten-year-old agency’s work in what he called a ‘whole system response’, bringing some 75 bodies (‘at last count’) such as the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and Border Force, intelligence agencies and the UK official National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and abroad the likes of Interpol and the European Union’s policing agency Europol, ‘together around a common set of operational goals’.
For the speech in full visit the NCA website. For the assessment document, visit https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/nsa. The assessment includes ‘cross-cutting enablers that enhance offenders’ abilities to conduct their criminal activities’, such as bribery and the ‘insider threat’ such as in accounting, banking and legal services; criminal use of technology (such as GPS tracking devices, ‘increasingly exploited by organised crime groups due to their availability and low cost’); and the UK border (whereby SOC groups ‘move commodities in and out of the UK and evade detection’).
For a recent court case of a corrupt port worker, part of a criminal conspiracy to import a large quantity of cocaine through the UK border, visit the NCA website.
Comment
See also the IOCTA (Internet Organised Crime Assessment) from the European Union’s policing agency Europol.
See the commentary ‘Has the Government Forgotten about Serious and Organised Crime?’ by Cathy Haenlein, Director of the Organised Crime and Policing research group and Senior Research Fellow at the defence and security think-tank RUSI.
In a recent speech at RUSI, chaired by Sir David Omand, former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that she was ‘concerned that our domestic security response is not keeping up with Britain’s fast-changing landscape’, and described ‘the new leadership and partnerships we need to keep our country safe’. You can watch or read the speech on the RUSI website.
