Hackers ‘love shopping in Harrods’

Cybercriminals love living in Britain because it lets them spend their ill-gotten gains at luxury stores like Harrods, a former police security chief has claimed.

Charlie Mcmurdie, who previously ran the Metropolitan Police’s fraud and high-tech crime divisions, said: “If you’re making millions at cybercrime, you don’t want to be in the back of beyond where you can’t spend your lovely cash or bitcoins; you want to be in the UK where you can go down to Harrods in Knightsbridge”.

She joked that “probably every tenth person going into Harrods is a cybercriminal”.

Speaking at a cybersecurity summit in London, Mcmurdie described how criminals would use “spending teams” in Harrods to buy expensive goods with stolen credit cards.

She said they buy items like £10,000 diamond-encrusted iphones, adding: “No one’s going to challenge them; they look like the part, they’re spending the part, they’ve got the cards, they’re all going through”.

Mcmurdie, now Senior Cyber Crime Advisor at Pricewaterhousecoopers, said another reason hackers like the UK is that its fast banking system is ideally suited to laundering money.

Criminals make rapid transfers between accounts to bounce their money between different banks, obscuring the source of the money and allowing them to withdraw it before the authorities catch up with them.

But she added that UK banks are also “switched on” at recognising money laundering, and are “pretty hot” at working with law enforcement.

Her comments underline the vast amounts of money being made through cybercrime. Research conducted earlier this year estimates it now generates $1.5 trillion (£1.1tn) every year.