Kate McMahon has been quoted in today’s article in the i-news; ‘UK is branded the ‘bank scam capital of the world’ with a lack of police resources blamed for rampant fraud‘.
The article explains that whilst the banking industry has plenty of resources set up to prevent fraud and to warn their customers before making suspicious payments, a lack of resources and expertise in the Police Service is preventing the Police from catching culprits and as a result the banks are left to pick up the bill.
There has been a call to up-skill police officers on cyber offences and how fraud works as this is holding back enforcement and investigations. Similarly there is criticism of Action Fraud, although they say that where there are viable lines of enquiry a report is sent to the local force of the victim to investigate, they have been described as a black box used for crime statistics but not actively worked on.
Kate McMahon was quoted as saying the average time for a case to be picked up by the police and passed on to court is two years. She said this has led to the UK being dubbed the bank scam capital of the world and says fraud needs to be moved up the political agenda. “Fraud has become so expensive to deal with that the state is leaving it to banks,” she said.
“A lot of fraud squads were moved to counterterrorism in recent years because of the forensic capability, but haven’t moved back. Policing is a huge problem and the more we ignore this, the more it lets fraudsters build up their gangs.” Kate said that more partnership is needed between the public and private sectors to target difficult investigative issues such as fake websites that may be in different countries.
