Crime toll to rise by 3million as figures finally cover fraud
Top officer reveals cyber scams will push the total to 10 million next month
CRIME levels will soar by 40 per cent now that figures reflecting the true scale of fraud are being added for the first time, a top police chief has admitted.
Adrian Leppard, commissioner of City of London Police, warned fellow bosses that an extra three million offences will soon be included in official statistics as victims reveal the scale of online fraud.
In a letter sent to all forces last week and seen by The Mail on Sunday, he wrote: ‘The public spotlight will fall on this issue soon as the results of the recently updated Crime Survey for England and Wales are published.
‘These will add an extra three million fraud and cyber incidents to the overall level of crime in the UK – an increase of up to 40 per cent.’
The rise will take the total number of crimes to more than ten million a year, undermining the Government’s insistence that society is becoming safer and raising fresh concerns about plans to cut billions more from police budgets.
Last night, Martyn Underhill, the Dorset crime tsar who has campaigned on behalf of fraud victims, said: ‘I’ve said for a long time that crime isn’t going down, it’s going online.
‘The release of this huge increase is timely as I hope it will make the Chancellor reflect on how much he cuts the police budget in December.’ The soar- ing crime rate will be revealed next month when the Office for National Statistics publishes its first estimate of frauds.
Figures for crimes recorded by police already include fraud, but faith in these statistics has been shaken after senior officers revealed the many ways in which they can be fiddled to meet targets. Latest figures show police in England and Wales recorded 3.8 million offences in the year to March 2015, including 230,630 frauds.
For the past 30 years, the ONS has been carrying out a separate survey to ask households if they have been victims of crime. Experts have long considered the survey more accurate than police figures, as it includes offences that were never reported to police.
The ONS recorded 6.8million crimes in the past year, the lowest level since 1981. But it admits there have been concerns that ‘the survey has failed to keep up with the changing nature of crime’, and for the past year it has been working on including fraud and cyber offences for the first time.
The first 2,000 respondents to the latest survey were asked new questions on financial offences, and the first estimates will be released in Octo- ber. Police predict that this will mean an extra three million offences added to the statistics – taking the total number of crimes to more than ten million for the first time in almost a decade.
Fraud is on the rise partly because it is so easy for criminals to target large numbers of victims. Fraudsters can send bulk emails asking for financial details, use bogus websites that trick online shoppers, or set up sophisticated phone scams in which gangs pretend to be bank staff, IT experts or even the police.
Mr Leppard’s letter revealed that City of London Police are working with banks and the Home Office to create a new National Fraud Taskforce, such is the scale of the issue.
It also provided new details of the problems suffered by Government hotline Action Fraud, which has been accused of failing victims since it took over the recording of frauds from police. Mr Leppard admitted ‘calls were not answered as quickly as usual’ when Broadcasting Support Services – the private firm that ran Action Fraud’s call centres – went bust earlier this year, as revealed by this newspaper.
However, he insisted that a new provider will improve the service for both victims and police forces, as well as taking data directly from industry to give a better idea of the true scale of cyber fraud attempts.
Mr Leppard added that a database called Know Fraud has been created, containing records of five million scams to allow officers to find linked suspects and tactics. ‘We close down some 4,000 websites, telephone numbers and bank accounts on a monthly basis, preventing over £500million of fraud annually,’ he wrote.
Officers have also begun visiting jailed fraudsters to find out how their scams work. In addition, City of London Police is setting up a Global Cyber Alliance with the New York District Attorney’s Office to tackle the threat of international online crime.