Accountants are ‘turning a blind eye to dirty money’
Organised crime gangs will not be stopped by bobbies on beat but investigators with cyber skills, says chief
ACCOUNTANTS are turning a blind eye to organised crime gangs making millions from fraud, the police chief who is heading Britain’s fight against economic crime has said.
Commander Karen Baxter, police national lead on economic crime, said some accountants and lawyers were “complicit” or “complacent” in the laundering of “dirty” money and were undermining public trust in their professions. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph a year since taking the job, her first with a national newspaper, Ms Baxter said she had been surprised at how few alerts on suspicious transactions were passed to law enforcement by accountants and solicitors when most proceeds of crime “at some point probably go through them”.
Ms Baxter has pledged to “turn up the dial” against fraud, which she admits has previously not been prioritised by police and wrongly portrayed as a victimless crime. She is promising a bolder investigative approach, introducing covert tactics honed from counterterror policing and detective skills used to bring to justice murderers and terrorist bombers in 26 years’ service in Northern Ireland.
As well as finding ways to “design out” fraud, she wants a whole system approach, where the private sector – banks, accountants and lawyers – work with her fraud teams, the National Crime Agency (NCA) and cyber crime agencies on investigations.
She cites figures, due to be published next month, showing accountants and lawyers accounted for just 1.06 per cent and 0.58 per cent of the 470,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to the NCA last year.
“You will have accountants and solicitors who are professional enablers because they know exactly what they’re involved in and are getting really well paid to do their job for criminal gangsters. Or they are complacent around understanding and looking at the detail of what they’re involved in,” she said. “It damages the trust of the profession when you have small groups that are not good in terms of their professional duties.”
Ms Baxter admitted she had not at first fully appreciated the impact of fraud and “how it’s connected to organised crime and hyperlinks to other types of harm” including drugs, people trafficking and violence.
This was one reason why she believed that putting 20,000 uniformed bobbies on the beat was not necessarily going to solve the crime wave.
“There’s a sense of reassurance on
‘The root causes of violent crime … comes back into criminal gangs and back to where the money is’
the front line of greater visibility of policing,” she said. “But the root causes of violent crime and the increase in murders comes back into criminal gangs and that comes back to where the money is.
“I’m not sure that uniforms will actually deal with that exploitation, which is a more sophisticated level. We need to have an investigative capability to deal with and dismantle those organised crime gangs.”
To achieve that, she aims to recruit a new breed of investigator with cyber skills, who may not be a traditional detective but a civilian member of staff.
“You need people to be proactive, to be interested in intelligence, to be curious about being quite probative about the information that is there in front of them,” she said. She said social media had become a “sweetie shop” for fraudsters, citing just one technique they use known as “herders and mules”. Herders trawl social media to find vulnerable mules whom they recruit through offers of cash to launder small amounts of dirty money through their accounts.
She identified the three biggest ways fraudsters breached people’s security as weak passwords, failure to install system updates and lack of two-step authentication to prevent access to data.
Of the 3.6 million reported frauds every year, it is estimated as little as 0.5 per cent result in a conviction. Pointing out it ranks below murder, violent and sexual crime, she added: “It is for us as the national lead force to raise the profile of why fraud is really important.”