Policing must catch up with online crime to regain the public’s trust
‘We cannot arrest our way out of the problem. The UK intelligence community is a vital part of the response’
If you came home to find someone had broken in, it is highly likely that you would call the police and expect an officer within hours. However, data from the Office of National Statistics’ annual crime survey show that if that same criminal breaks into your bank account, you are far less likely to report it.
The reasons for this are complex, but emerging research points to failures in the policing response as being one cause of the large-scale under-reporting of fraud in the UK. Put simply, people have come to expect (and to some extent accept) that reporting an instance of fraud to the police is, in many cases, futile.
The societal consequences of this are profound; not only does it undermine confidence in policing, but also broader faith in the rule of law.
How did this situation come to pass? And what is needed to turn the tide on the crime to which people are more likely to fall victim than any other?
To answer the first question, for decades fraud has been a “Cinderella service” in policing, too often viewed as a low-harm crime and deprioritised
‘There is a responsibility vacuum around fraud, it being everyone’s problem, but nobody’s priority’
against more visible street-level wrongdoing. This has to led underresourcing by government and police forces. The consequence has been that policing was found sleeping as fraud morphed, through the growth of the internet, into the high-volume and largely cyber-enabled crime it is today.
Playing catch-up with the new brand of sophisticated global cyber fraudster will not be easy after so many years of neglect, but it is essential that policing does so, and quickly, to regain public trust and confidence.
Reform along a number of lines is essential. First, as Sir Craig Mackey’s review last year pointed out, we need to invest in Action Fraud, the central fraud reporting service. Although the concept is sound, resourcing and investment have failed to keep pace with reporting levels. As a minimum, the Government needs to fund Action Fraud properly and equip investigators with the AI and machine learning data analysis tools that have become commonplace in the financial sector.
Second, Action Fraud cannot solve this problem alone – it relies on the adoption of cases by an overstretched and under-skilled contingent in local policing over which it has no mandate. This has to change. The Government needs to establish a centrally coordinated but locally delivered policing response, ring-fenced from central police force budgets.
Third, with most of the threat emanating from overseas, often in places outside the reach of the UK criminal justice system, it is important to recognise that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem. A greater role
for the UK intelligence community in disrupting the online threat is an essential component of the response. The establishment of GCHQ’S suspicious email reporting service last year was a good first step, but more needs to be done.
Yet all of this will come to naught without greater leadership from the Government. For too long there has been a responsibility vacuum around fraud, it being everybody’s problem, but nobody’s priority. Given the scale, impact and societal consequences of the UK’S endemic fraud problem, the Government needs to view fraud for what it is; a threat to our economic and national security.