The scale of online fraud has become so “enormous” that the police cannot stop it and the public must do more to protect themselves, the country’s most senior economic crime officer has said.
Adrian Leppard, the City of London police commissioner, said that individuals needed to take more responsibility for online security because, from a policing perspective, “clearly there isn’t a capacity to deal with all fraud”.
Mr Leppard called for a campaign to raise national awareness, akin to those that ran in the 1980s about drink-driving, to highlight the risks posed by online scams and to suggest ways to prevent personal computers being hacked.
Online crime, from lottery and investment fraud schemes to the hacking of businesses to gain personal data, is estimated to cost the UK economy more than £50 billion annually.
Mr Leppard, whose remit includes economic crime and cyber crime, said that the City of London and the National Crime Agency were targeting the biggest organised crime groups, while other forces were improving their skills to tackle cyber crime.
Advertisement
However, he admitted that the problem of online fraud was huge in scale and criminals were evading capture by operating from jurisdictions beyond the reach of the UK authorities. British police forces have introduced hubs of cyber-crime experts but their efforts were “a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the problem we are facing”.
Mr Leppard’s comments came after The Times revealed that nearly four million bank and credit card frauds were omitted from statistics for England and Wales. An estimate by the Office of National Statistics indicates that about seven people are defrauded every minute.
Mr Leppard said: “Economic crime is predominantly cyber-related. The reason we have problems in this area are two-fold: one, the scale of what is happening; it’s enormous. And secondly, the jurisdiction — the bulk of offending now is taking place overseas. Where you can reach the offenders in this nation and introduce legislation, you can have an impact. If the offending is overseas, where you don’t have legislation or powers to reach them, that becomes very difficult.
“The majority of the threat is coming in, on the internet, from countries all over the world, so it is going to be very hard. We can’t shut down that threat — no domestic country can.”
Many of the biggest online scams in recent years — in particular those targeting the elderly about fake lottery wins or lonely hearts in online dating scams — have operated out of Nigeria.
Advertisement
Calling for a campaign, Mr Leppard said: “When there was a shift change in this country in wearing seatbelts, or drink-driving, you would see TV campaigns and the release of products. Then, everyone in every community knew what they had to do. We need that level of public communication coupled with real and seriously useful products for people; how they need to protect themselves, what they need to do.
“Each person has access to the internet and online banking. Each person is exposed. We’ve got to find a national campaign, coupled with real products and useful tools, that can help each sector of society protect themselves.
“We still have to do a lot more to educate the public [and] help small businesses to protect themselves. And even in big business environments [over the] theft of personal information. That’s the big challenge for big industry — how do they ensure their data systems are secure so they’re not being subjected to cyber attack, [so that] people aren’t stealing information which later becomes the catalyst for the fraud itself.”
Mr Leppard said that online fraud figures should be included in the annual crime survey so that the extent of the problem could be uncovered,
Advertisement
In a speech to be given today at a crime symposium in Cambridge, the government’s chief law officer will warn of the threat of cyber crime. Jeremy Wright, QC, the attorney-general, says the “staggering growth” in information in cyber space has led to criminal gangs targeting people’s details to defraud bank accounts and clone credit cards. He says: “The losses are smaller in relative terms, but are still devastating to individual victims concerned.”