Spies take the fight to text scammers

Tech that bombards people with messages to be banned under Home Secretary’s curbs

SPIES are to be brought in to track down text scammers, the Home Secretary will announce today.

As part of a crackdown on fraud, the three intelligence agencies will work with new regional squads of police officers to find and stop scammers targeting Britons, including from abroad.

The Government will also ban technology that allows criminals to bombard hundreds of people every minute with phishing text messages.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Suella Braverman says: “We must bring more fraudsters to justice.”

Only 4,913 fraud offences – one in 1,000 – resulted in a charge or summons last year, out of 4.9million scams reported in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) annual survey of crime.

Fraud is now the most common crime in the UK, with one in 15 having fallen victim, costing nearly £7billion a year.

Mrs Braverman says: “Our action needs to be bold and firm, but prevention is as important as any cure. That’s why there must be an increased effort to block fraud at source.”

The Home Office says 70 per cent of frauds originate abroad or are linked to overseas gangs.

Most common are push payment scams, tricking victims into transferring cash, unauthorised payment card fraud and phishing. The latest are “Hi Mum” text scams, where fraudsters pretend to be distressed children to swindle money out of parents.

The Prime Minister backed the new fraud strategy, which is set to be announced by Mrs Braverman in the Commons today.

Rishi Sunak said: “We will take the fight to these fraudsters, wherever they try to hide. By blocking scams at the source, boosting protections for people and bolstering enforcement, we will stop more of these cold-hearted crimes from happening in the first place and make sure justice is done.”

GCHQ already works with banks to combat fraud and cyber attacks but will be given an expanded role alongside MI6 and MI5 to lead the attempt to “identify and disrupt” scammers overseas.

It will work with a new police

National Fraud Squad, which will overhaul how scams are investigated by taking a proactive, intelligence-led approach, backed by 400 new specialist investigators, the Government said.

Mrs Braverman says the National Cyber Security Centre, which brings together experts, including GCHQ, had already taken down 120,000 scams but she said ministers would go further by “naming and shaming” websites where the most fraud took place.

Errant tech firms and social media platforms that fail to prevent fraud on their sites will face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover under the Online Safety Bill being considered by the Lords.

Action Fraud, the police reporting centre, will be overhauled after being branded “not fit for purpose” by MPS.

It will be replaced by a simpler website to report scams, a bigger call centre

‘By blocking scams at the source, we will stop more of these crimes and make sure justice is done’

with 30 per cent more staff and an online portal for victims to receive updates on the progress of their cases. Even its name could be changed.

As part of a £30million government cash injection to revamp Action Fraud, an artificial intelligence computer system is being built to act as a “super brain” to analyse and “join the dots” on all fraud in the UK to identify the criminals behind it. It is expected to be launched next year.

All fraud will be reported to the revamped Action Fraud, which will help determine whether it is so big and serious that the investigation should be led by the National Crime Agency, new reinforced regional police teams or local forces.

Fraud has also been put on a par with serious and organised crime as a national threat, requiring police forces to devote more resources to investigations. In 2021, 1,753 officers and staff were focused on economic crimes, 0.8 per cent of the total police

workforce even though fraud accounts for 41 per cent of all crime.

Under legal changes, banks will be able to delay payments from being processed for longer than the current one working plus 24 hours to allow for suspect payments to be investigated.

Cold calls on financial products such as sham insurance or cryptocurrency schemes will be banned, as will “SIM farms”, which are devices that can be loaded with hundreds of SIM cards to send thousands of scam texts simultaneously. The Government will also review the use of mass texting services in an attempt to prevent the technology from helping criminals.

A new anti-fraud champion, Anthony Browne MP, a former chief executive of the British Banking Association and member of Treasury committee, has been appointed.

Mr Browne said: “The tech sector, phone companies and financial services firms must take responsibility for protecting their users by stopping fraud happening in the first place, and work together to design out fraud.

“We can use the technologies fraudsters are exploiting against them to stop them in their tracks.”

Helena Wood, co-head of Rusi’s UK Economic Crime Programme, said the extra officers, while welcome, would still not lift current policing resources allocated to fraud above the current 1 per cent.

She said that the Government should not have backed off imposing a levy on tech and social media firms given the “outsized role” they played in facilitating scams.

Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, said: “This plan is too little, too late and fails to match the scale of the problem. All the Home Secretary has delivered is a rebadging of existing national teams, and a re-announcement on the replacement of Action Fraud from almost two years ago.