Yard’s fraud taskforce was scrapped

A SPECIALIST police team dedicated to fighting fraud and online bank scams has been disbanded.

Scotland Yard’s Falcon taskforce caught Britain’s biggest bank transfer fraudster and recovered £47million of his victims’ money. However, months after Feezan Choudhary was jailed, the elite unit was shut down in the face of police cuts.

Choudhary stole £113million from 750 victims by posing as a member of antifraud departments and using data provided by corrupt staff. He was captured following a six-month operation in 2016 by the Falcon team, which stands for Fraud And Linked Crime Online Taskforce. Yesterday a senior police officer said the decision was a mistake. ‘I believe there are between three and five active gangs currently out there, responsible for the vast majority of this sort of crime,’ he warned.

‘They have quite a lot in common and there are some obvious links between them. On the Choudhary case, we learned a lot about how they operate and how to take them down.

‘It’s tricky and time-consuming, and takes a lot of surveillance, but we felt there was a good chance it could be done again and that the Falcon taskforce were the people to do it.

‘Unfortunately a decision was taken to disband the taskforce. We were told it was due to cuts. Since then, no major bank transfer fraud gang has been prosecuted and the amount of that sort of crime has massively gone up.’

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘Due to the changing nature of crime, the Met must continually develop and adapt. As such the Falcon taskforce was restructured in 2016 ... officers were retained to ensure the continuity and sharing of expertise in this area within the Serious and Organised Crime [unit].’