Can’t help, police tell fraud victims

Even clear proof is not enough as cases pile up. By Sam Sherwood.

Businesses are spending thousands of dollars on private investigators to probe white-collar crime because police won’t touch fraud cases unless the evidence is ‘‘gold-plated’’, sources say.

Figures released under the Official Information Act show that as at July 28, there were 888 files yet to be assigned for investigation.

One business owner who detected an alleged theft by an employee was ‘‘flabbergasted’’ to receive a letter from police saying they did not have resources to initiate a prosecution.

Police Association president Chris Cahill said the number of fraud files yet to be assigned was a ‘‘total reflection’’ of the lack of resources and overload of work shouldered by the police’s investigative units.

‘‘Nearly all investigations take priority over fraud so any violent offending, child abuse or adult sexual assault is always going to take precedent, which is probably understandable, and the reality is something drops off.’’

Cahill said it was ‘‘not good enough’’ for fraud to be given such a low priority.

‘‘A number of victims of these frauds suffer significant loss. Some of these people would have lost a significant portion of their retirement savings.’’

National manager of financial crime Detective Senior Sergeant Iain Chapman said the number of files waiting to be assigned was ‘‘not an overwhelming figure by any stretch’’.

The number of unassigned cases varied from day to day and most of those files were yet to go through a ‘‘full assessment’’.

Since February, police had prosecuted about 20 per cent of the fraud-related cases reported to them, Chapman said.

Mike Gillam, of private investigation firm The Investigators, is investigating a case in which a business owner discovered an area manager was offering cash sales to customers, and keeping the money.

The business owner, who did not want to be identified, said he had expected that because there were written records, including emails, it would be a ‘‘slam dunk’’.

The business owner said he was flabbergasted that police had not acted.

‘‘What really annoys me is that

we have the resources, we can get a private investigator.

‘‘If you’re the local dairy or a fish and chip shop, you wouldn’t have that.’’

If the police still failed to prosecute, he would take civil proceedings against the employee, who had been with the company for 13 years.

‘‘We’re not prepared to know someone has stolen that much money from us and has walked away without even a scratch on his record.’’

Gillam said he had ‘‘made more progress in five minutes than the police had in two months’’.

‘‘More often than not, the client asks us to investigate because the police are unwilling, or unable due to staffing levels to investigate and prosecute.’’

Sources said it’s commonplace for victims to go to police, only to be told to collate the evidence into a cohesive package.

‘‘It needs to be gold-plated before police will do anything, if anything,’’ a source said.

Often, they were filed prematurely because ‘‘there’s no one to do them’’.

Former Serious Fraud Office acting chief executive Simon McArley said investigating fraud came down to a question of economic benefit.

‘‘The amount of money that is lost in these sort of frauds is quite significant, if you could do something about it you could do a lot for economic growth,’’ McArley said.

Detectives around the country’s CIBs are today assigned fraud investigations alongside their rape, robbery, theft and homicide cases, which are then prioritised by their supervisors, with the aid of a computer matrix that ranks which crimes need to be investigated first.

The new public data reporting system police have launched showed how many fraud offenders were identified. But the same database does not record the number of fraud cases or their resolution rates.

The last publicly recorded fraud resolution data showed police were solving fewer than half of all fraud and deception crime reported to them in 2014.