Cyber crime shambles
Only 1% of web offences reported to the police leads to a prosecution
JUST 1 per cent of frauds and cyber crimes reported to police results in prosecution, official figures show.
Police overwhelmed by rocketing levels of fraud, with an average of 78 crimes reported every hour across Britain, are failing to investigate 90 per cent of the cases reported.
Charges were brought in just 7,447 cases in the year to March 2016, which represents just over 1 per cent of the 682,899 reports of financial scams to police, banks and businesses.
The figures suggest that just one in ten scams are passed to detectives to look into and almost half of those cases are then dropped due to evidential difficulties or a failure to identify the culprit.
Despite fraud becoming Britain’s most common crime, costing around £193billion a year, prosecutions fell by 13 per cent last year and the number of cases shelved by officers more than doubled.
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics showing there were 3.5million frauds and 1.9million cyber crimes in 2016 – half of all offences in the country.
But just a fraction of offences are reported to police because victims feel embarrassed or believe little can be done to catch the culprits.
Police figures from April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016 show 682,899 fraud and cyber crime reports were made to forces, bank and credit card companies and the fraud prevention service, CIFAS.
But only 70,478 of those – just 10 per cent – were passed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB). The figures for all forces in England and Wales show that there were 39,898 cases resolved in that period, but in the majority of cases police decided not to prosecute.
Only 10,099 cases resulted in any form of punishment, with a quarter of those let off with a caution, warning, penalty notice or community resolution.
And in some areas police prose- cuted in only a handful of cases in a year despite hundreds of crimes being reported.
Leicestershire Police looked at 858 crime reports in the year to March 2016, but in that year crimi- nals in only six cases faced justice – less than 1 per cent.
Norfolk Police received 353 reports of fraud, but offenders in only seven cases faced any punishment. And in Devon and Cornwall just 17 cases resulted in any crimi- nal sanction out of 915 referred for investigation. Even the Metropolitan Police, the UK’s biggest force, only saw 8 per cent of the 26,663 cases it handled result in a ‘judicial outcome’.
Police say the figures only show outcomes in 2016, but some cases may have been referred before 2015 and also some may still be under investigation, so officials consider the data ‘experimental’.
And detectives are often powerless as half of the conmen are based overseas and foreign banks refuse to help track them down.
However, police have had some success in shutting down fraud and cyber crime schemes. City of London Police, the national policing lead for fraud, disrupted a total of 162,252 scams by shutting down 1,185 fraudulent websites, 118,670 telephone cons and suspending 42,307 bank accounts used for stolen funds.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said that ‘ fraud cases tend to be lengthy and complex’ and so ‘many of the cases referred to us in 2015/ 16 will still be under investigation’.
A City of London Police spokesman said reports are stored in case they may become useful in any future investigations.
‘Detectives are often powerless’