NESTA Crime Online - University of Brighton Repository

is taken, priority is understandably given to issues like child pornography, though this
means resources are not available to tackle financial cybercrime.
3.1.2 The national level
At the national level, law enforcement agencies are ill-equipped to address cybercrime.
Funding is woefully inadequate and unlikely to rise to acceptable levels in the
foreseeable future and clear decisions have to be taken over priorities. The creation of
the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) was a bold move, insofar as it
attempted to go beyond traditional law enforcement responses by deploying intelligence
specialists as the senior executive officers. But its successes have been limited which is
why an E-Crime Unit was established. However, the E-Crime Unit appears underfunded
and unlikely to be resourced to anything close to an adequate level considering the scale
and nature of the problem. The problems associated with cybercrime clearly require
urgent attention at a ministerial level. The E-Crime unit has a budget of only £7 million
for three years and the City of London Police, who have national responsibility for credit
card and cheque fraud, only have thirteen officers to cover the entire country. Although
highly professional and committed, there is little or no capacity to do anything more
than attempt to enforce the law after crimes have been committed and if they are over
£20,000. There appears to be little or no response possible regionally or locally due to
the lack of resources and expertise. 230 An individual who has been the victim of credit
card fraud will first be requested by the authorities to contact their bank or card
company, not least to ensure compensation. Data capture and analysis remain firmly in
the domain of the private sector and the role of the police is largely restricted to limited
enforcement, purely on the basis of resource constraints.
By the autumn of 2009 the new National Fraud Reporting Centre (NFRC) should allow for
the differentiation of different types of cybercrime. However, even then the
underreporting of private data breaches is likely to mean the data collected will be
inaccurate. This has been a recurrent critical concern raised by the majority of our
interviewees, including IT security firms, IT experts, academics and the police. This view
was also expressed by the House of Lords Science and Technology committee in 2007 in
its personal security report: "a data security breach notification law would be among the
230 Interviews with police suggested that until such time as financial cybercrime becomes a political priority, it
is unlikely to be assigned adequate resources by chief constables with limited budgets.
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