SCALE OF CYBER CRIME COULD BE MORE THAN 100 TIMES HIGHER THAN OFFICIAL REPORTS

The scale of cyber crime nationwide could be more than 100 times higher than recorded statistics.

National Crime Agency (NCA) figures reveal that just 0.7 per cent of estimated cyber crimes were reported to the police last year.

Factors include firms fearing reputational damage if their case ends up public while many individuals also prefer to remain silent if they are the victims of romance fraud or the misuse of private pictures.

The NCA report said: “Under-reporting of cyber crime remains a key barrier to our understanding of its true scale and cost.

“The number of reports from individuals is higher than those received from businesses, but it is still lower than anticipated. Emerging scams include criminals impersonating high-ranking members of organisations to trick colleagues into redirecting money transfers.

For example, this paper was told of one North-East senior manager whose email address was “spoofed” - whereby criminals either fake someone’s email address or use one very close to it - with the result that another employee was nearly persuaded to pay a five-figure bogus invoice at “their boss’s” request.

The NCA said 15,246 reports of cyber crime were made to Action Fraud, the UK’s national fraud and cyber crime reporting centre, between November 2015 and October 2016.

But the report said those figures “fall far below” the Office for National Statistics’ estimate that there were about two million victims in England and Wales alone in the past year.

The NCA said: “This disparity highlights the scale of under-reporting by both individuals and businesses.”

The NCA’s report reveals that the primary threat to the United Kingdom “continues to stem from Russian-speaking countries” although the threat is becoming “increasingly global”.