The Midlands Fraud Forum enjoyed another packed house at its 11th annual conference yesterday at Tally Ho Conference Centre at Edgbaston, Birmingham. More than 200 were at the conference, a mix across the public and private sectors. Pictured is one of the afternoon presentations, by Chris King of Dudley Trading Standards.
As ever the MFF brought together a spectrum of speakers, from all ends of the counter-fraud compass; this year including West Midlands Police Assistant Chief Constable Alex Murray, Mike Betts of the Economic Crime Academy, City of London Police, on investigations, Dr Dave Walsh of the University of Derby on how to interview, and David Benford of Blackstage Forensics on open source intelligence gathering and profiling.
This year was the first conference as chairman for David Clark, of Saint-Gobain Building Distribution, who took over last year from Mark Surguy, of law firm Weightmans.
In an address to the conference, David Clark pointed to MFF work last year, including – with the Insolvency Service and under the cinematic direction of Glenn Wicks – a series of 13 fraud prevention videos. “These films are unique and no organisation has ever made a series of films of this nature and brought them together in one place. The videos were written and produced by the MFF and no public funding was used. The films portray the stories of actual victims of crime, told by actors. Each of the victims portrays a #IFONLY experience the victim had learnt the hard way. The videos range from advice of a retail manager on how to avoid crime, cyber enabled fraud and romance fraud through to elderly victims who have been preyed on.”
On the work to do in the sector, David Clark pointed to stats including from the University of Portsmouth, that the £190bn cost of fraud to the UK represents more than the Government spends on health and defence combined or all welfare payments excluding pensions . David Clark said: “No matter what your view is of statistics, fraud and cybercrime is arguably one of today’s major problems and the scale and negative impact of fraud is increasing considerably with new technology. Even in the time we have prepared for this conference the ONS said police had recorded 5.2m offences in the year to June, which reflected genuine increases in some crime categories as well as continuing improvements in some categories. The crime survey estimated there were 10.8m incidents, including 5m of fraud, online crime and computer misuse.”
