Category: The Authorities

Financial Loss Due to Fraud

 

 

Source: Crime Survey for England and Wales. Office of National Statistics. 2017 data.

 Cost Fraud Involving Financial Loss (%) Cumulative Loss (%)
Less than £20 9.0 9.0
£20 – £99 30.0 39.0
£100 – £249 18.8 57.9
£250 – £499 14.5 72.3
£500 – £999 10.9 83.2
£1000 – £2,499 9.6 92.8
£2,500 – £4,999 4.2 97.0
£5,000 – £9,999 1.7 98.7
£10,000 – £19,999 0.8 99.4
£20,000 and above 0.6 100.0

You can see from the figures that there were modest losses (less than £100) for 39 % of victims, but at the other extreme, some people lost more than £20,000.

The higher losses are most commonly from frauds involving house purchase and investment fraud.

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UK Cyber Force

The UK government announced the creation of a £250m cyber-force unit that will combat terrorist groups and domestic gangs.

The government is planning it to be an offensive cyber warfare unit in a bid to meet the online threat posed by Russia, North Korea, Iran and other countries active in cyber-attacks.

Experts will be recruited from the military, security services and industry for the project which will be set up by the Ministry of Defence and GCHQ.

In July 2019, a parliamentary committee warned that ministers are failing to get to grip with the shortage in cyber security experts despite the “potentially severe implications” for national security.

MPs and peers said the situation is of “serious concern”, but the Government response lacks “urgency”.

They warned that the WannaCry attack in May 2017, which hit the NHS, showed the need to protect critical national infrastructure  from cyber threats.

In July, a Government spokeswoman said: “We have a £1.9 billion National Cyber Security Strategy, opened the world-leading National Cyber Security Centre and continue to build on our cyber security knowledge, skills and capability.”

For obvious reasons, the UK’s cyber-attack capabilities are a secret, but are widely regarded to be very active.

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Statistics on Fraud

 

 

Government statistics on fraud include analysis by age, qualifications, ethnic group etc. for the year 2016

Age Group Overall (%) Men (%) Women (%)
16-24 4.8 4.8 4.8
25-34 7.9 7.1 8.6
35-44 7.7 8.4 7.1
45-54 7.5 6.7 8.3
55-64 6.4 7.1 5.6
65-74 4.9 5.3 4.5
74+ 3.3 4.4 2.4

 

You can see from these figures that the age group with the highest incidence of fraud is the 25 – 54 year olds. There could be many reason for this but the most obvious is that this group is likely the most financially active and hence there are more occasions where they can be defrauded.

The separate figures for men and women are roughly the same and show nearly the same pattern by age.

The government statistics also include analysis by marital status and this shows little difference between marrieds and unmarried, except for much lower reports of fraud for widowed people. This is likely to be for the reason that this is largely an older group of people and hence less financially active on average.

The analysis by occupation is interesting in that the greatest incidence of fraud is for those in the professional / managerial group. This may be due to these people being more likely to be involved with investments, overseas properties, visits to major events around the world etc. which create more opportunities to be victims of fraud.

There are various other analyses of the data and the analysis by highest qualification achieved shows highest levels of fraud for those with a degree or equivalent.  This may be due to these people having a higher level of income or can you think of a more likely reason?

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Trading Standards Stop Cold Calling Pack

Trading Standards across the UK have been fighting to stop cold callers, where they intimidate householders, refuse to leave till something is purchased, worry the elderly, sell poor quality products at high prices, charge for services but don’t deliver and so on.

There are cold callers who provide legitimate services and care about their customers of course, but for many householders, unwanted cold callers are a real problem.

Buckinghamshire and Surrey trading standards co-operate in many areas and have jointly released a Stop Cold Calling sticker pack which is freely available to householders in both counties.

 

 

The pack contains:-

  • A warning sticker to go on the outside of your front door. This is to deter cold callers and makes it plain to them that they are not welcome and failure to leave is a criminal offence
  • A transparent version of the sticker that can attached inside a window
  • A “Don’t be a Victim of Doorstep Crime” sticker to go inside your door as a reminder

There’s also relevant information about cold calling and an invitation to sign up to their weekly newsletter called TS alert.

If you want this pack – contact your local trading standards as most have an equivalent service.

This a useful provision to help people who find it difficult or worrying to get rid of cold callers.

Do you have an opinion on this matter? Please comment in the box below.

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FBI Take Down 74 Business Email Scammers

The FBI call this scam “Business Email Compromise” (BEC).

It’s when a scammer gets the email address of a senior member of a business and impersonates them in emails asking for money to be transferred to an outside account and it is a very common and sadly quite lucrative scam.

It is a rapidly rising scam and estimated to cost business some hundreds of millions of dollars last year.

The FBI report that the elderly, art galleries and collectors, and real estate purchasers have also found themselves targets over the last few years.

The FBI worked with law enforcement agencies from four continents to takedown a ring of cybercriminals responsible for a series of business e-mail compromise schemes. According to the Department of Justice, the scams led to $14 million in phony wire transfers.

The exercise was called Operation Wire Wire and resulted in the seizure of $2.4M, 42 arrests across the United States, 29 in Nigeria, and three in Canada, Mauritius and Poland.

The FBI thanked the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the Toronto Police Service, the Mauritian Attorney-General and the Commissioner of Police, Polish Police Central Bureau of Investigation, Indonesian National Police Cyber Crimes Unit, and the Royal Malaysia Police, for assisting them in the operation.

23 of the U.S. arrests were made in the state of Florida where individuals reportedly laundered roughly $10M from BEC scams. Another scam in Connecticut resulted in the loss of $2.6 million.

For one attack the FBI enlisted the help of the IRS’ Criminal Investigation unit. Those arrested – a pair of Nigerian nationals living in Texas – allegedly sent a real estate closing attorney an email asking for $246,000 be wired to their account. The victim lost $130,000 after the bank was notified of the fraud and froze $116,000.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

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