Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
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POLICING CHALLENGES<br />
Fraud and policing<br />
Professor Michael Levi provides a briefing<br />
for police and crime commissioners<br />
Michael Levi is Professor of<br />
Criminology, Centre for Crime,<br />
Law and Justice, Cardiff School<br />
of Social Sciences, Cardiff<br />
University<br />
Fraud is a deceptively simple word<br />
covering a very broad territory.<br />
It is a way of making money<br />
illegally via deception, whether that<br />
deception is directly person-to-person in<br />
real space or in virtual space; operates<br />
by false stories alone, via the use of false<br />
physical or e-documents or via Personal<br />
Identification Numbers or uses genuine<br />
or phoney businesses as tools of fraud.<br />
Some are planned as scams from the<br />
start, sometimes as part of an organised<br />
crime group (OCG) activity; others –<br />
with or without involvement of outsiders<br />
– are the result of insiders spotting<br />
system weaknesses which, if undetected,<br />
may spread from there into much larger<br />
schemes.<br />
Fraud offers higher rewards and<br />
lesser risks of long jail time than<br />
does conventional crime, posing the<br />
question of why would people commit<br />
other property crimes (or even drug<br />
trafficking) if they could commit fraud<br />
What is clear is that these problems will<br />
not go away.<br />
Concern about fraud has been<br />
growing in governmental, policing<br />
and in some business circles, because<br />
it is regarded as the modern crime.<br />
In England and Wales, the Fraud Act<br />
2006 1 made it simpler to prosecute.<br />
Mainstream criminal justice resources<br />
have not kept pace with these concerns,<br />
and City scandals in 2012 have<br />
highlighted the disgust people feel<br />
at bankers ripping them off without<br />
retribution.<br />
The Annual Fraud Indicator 2012<br />
estimates <strong>UK</strong> fraud at £73 billion,<br />
including fraud against individuals at<br />
£6.1 billion, compared with £2.18<br />
billion for theft, burglary and robbery<br />
against individuals combined (estimated<br />
in 2003, since when property crime<br />
figures have fallen).<br />
But fraud is not just an issue for<br />
London and other major centres of<br />
finance. National Fraud Authority (NFA)<br />
data shows that fraud is widely spread<br />
around the country, in all social and age<br />
segments 2 . Research shows that nearly<br />
half of the <strong>UK</strong> population has been<br />
targeted by scams, and that one in 12<br />
will fall victim at least once during their<br />
lifetime 3 .<br />
The police response to fraud<br />
What is the current and planned policing<br />
response to these issues Investigation is<br />
currently distributed within a declining<br />
number of specialised economic crime<br />
departments (like the City of London<br />
national ‘lead force’); SOCA; and generic<br />
‘serious crime’ units and divisions in<br />
individual forces. Some e-crime resources<br />
are also used on frauds, although not as<br />
many as on internet porn.<br />
There is a larger number of<br />
investigators in non-police agencies, who<br />
interact with police mainly when they<br />
need them for powers of arrest. There<br />
are now also two privately funded police<br />
units focused primarily on ‘organised’<br />
volume fraud: (1) the Dedicated<br />
Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit, a joint<br />
City of London/Metropolitan <strong>Police</strong><br />
Unit established in 2002, and (2) the<br />
34-strong Insurance Fraud Enforcement<br />
Department, established in 2012 4 .<br />
Within three general ‘strategic<br />
objectives’ of awareness, prevention and<br />
96 | POLICING <strong>UK</strong>