Scammers face Asbo-style bans on social life
Curbs on who offenders can talk to and where they can travel in new plan to combat online fraudsters
SCAMMERS are to be given Asbo-style orders to stop them socialising under a fraud crackdown announced by Suella Braverman.
The Home Secretary is proposing to expand the use of serious crime prevention orders (SCPOS) to scammers in cases where investigators believe there are “reasonable grounds” they will defraud victims. They could be used against suspected criminals even if they have not been convicted of fraud.
The move would enable judges and magistrates to place stringent restrictions on who they associate or communicate with, their travel in the UK or abroad, use of mobile phones or bank accounts and working arrangements. Anyone who breaches an order would face up to five years in jail.
The Home Office’s new strategy, published yesterday, proposes “to make SCPOS more accessible and easier to impose, giving law enforcement more tools to restrict the activities of serious and organised criminals”. Ministers are also considering “fraud-specific” orders as part of an independent review into expanding the civil powers that investigators can use to disrupt scammers.
In addition, the Government is proposing powers that would enable police investigators to “seize control of and require the takedown of” suspected fraudsters’ websites, including domain names and IP addresses.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, said it was part of a strategy to deter and block scams in an attempt to reduce fraud, which accounts for 41 per cent of all crime and costs at least £7billion a year. In the year to December 2022, one in 15 adults were victims.
“What I’m trying to do is to reduce the incidence of fraud in the UK and bring it down by 10 per cent over 2024. Now, part of that has to do with prosecution rates, but actually most of it has to do with blocking the avenues to fraud currently available to the scammer, the spoofing, and many other areas.”
The strategy revealed that for every 1,000 estimated frauds, there was just one successful prosecution.
Ministers are creating a new national and regional fraud squad of 500 police officers that will be fully operational by 2025 but Mr Tugendhat said they also proposed greater use of magistrates for prosecutions with an extra 2,000 JPS to be recruited over 2024
“Prosecution does matter. That’s why we’re opening a new court in the City of London to bring 550 more cases to trial per year and we’re looking to hire 1,000 new Crown Court judges,” he said.
Reports show two-thirds of the most common frauds are now originating from social media platforms.
Analysis by Revolut, a tech firm offering financial services, found 63.9 per cent of all APP fraud, where victims are tricked into making big payments, was accounted for by six major platforms.
Ministers have rejected calls to force the companies to compensate victims. But Mr Tugendhat said they would be held to account with fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover under the Online Safety Bill if they failed to prevent scams on their platforms.
The Prime Minister, on a visit in Buckinghamshire to promote the new fraud strategy, said he had received fake messages.
He told broadcasters he had not fallen for it “largely because I don’t have time now to answer my phone any more”.