Ideas of what could be done to make the UK’s response to fraud contrasted sadly and badly with how little good is going on to prevent and deter fraudsters, causing the number one volume crime for the UK – that should have a much higher focus, as a national security problem, the latest OSPAs thought leadership webinar heard this afternoon.
Speakers also were quicker to criticise others. The former Derbyshire chief constable Mick Creedon ‘firmly blamed’ the government. He argued that while other illnesses such as diabetes and cancer killed more UK people in a year than had died of covid-19 so far, the government response to the pandemic at least showed that the state could bring together resources and agencies against the covid problem. We still don’t know the scale, depth and cost of the impact of fraud; later he contrasted how the Home Office could say the number of bicycle thefts in a village, but could not give a figure for fraud; and any fraud figure was a gross under-estimate. He called for police and others to use the MAPPA process (Multi-agency public protection arrangements) as used against other crime types.
The speakers in order of introduction by organiser Prof Martin Gill were Keith Ditcham, Acting Director-Senior Research Fellow, Organised Crime and Policing at the Whitehall-based defence and security think-tank RUSI; Alex Rothwell, who as Detective Chief Superintendent at City of London Police is head of fraud operations for the force, which leads for UK policing on economic crime; Dr Janice Goldstraw-White the criminologist and author about white-collar crime; and Mick Creedon, now of the criminal and covert investigation software firm Altia-ABM.
“I think the government can do something,” Creedon said. When something big and cataclysmic happens, change can happen; until then policing doesn’t change; he gave the non-fraud previous examples of the Hillsborough crushing tragedy, the Stephen Lawrence murder case, the Peter Sutcliffe murders, and 7-7 and 9-11 in counter-terrorism.
Alex Rothwell too argued that government should take a lead. He began by saying: “There is no way that law enforcement can solve this problem on its own.” He and Mick Creedon made the point about police priorities; that police have other crimes to police, and do much non-crime work, before the pandemic around mental health and the effects of austerity; and in the pandemic enforcing the ‘rule of six’. Rothwell said: “Fraud is fundamentally preventable.” That did raise the question of – just as in the physical world a householder would be expected to shut their windows – whether businesses should be told to protect themselves against financial crime.
“And actually I don’t think we are doing a bad job,” Rothwell said. “I don’t think it is time to privatise fraud, just yet; but it is time to be smarter about our relationships and develop some common ground.”
Dr Janice Goldstraw-White began: “This is a volume crime, it’s increasing, and we only have limited resources to look at them.” Tackling fraud was not a priority for many, in the public and private sector, and fraudsters were continually finding new methods. Where businesses suffer fraud, still the same basic weaknesses were hands-off management; internal fraud controls lacking; and departments generally not talking to each other. In her opinion we needed to do something differently; to do things smarter, and make decisions on sound information.
As a criminologist, Prof Martin Gill studies crime from the offenders’ point of view; how they are able to get away with it, by avoiding security measures. This came out when he made the discomforting point that the chances of a fraudster being caught, prosecuted, and convicted were low; while the chances of making lots of money were high. The panel agreed that fraud is anything but a victimless crime; for one thing, the elderly, sufferers from dementia and other vulnerable people are victims; how to protect them?
Alex Rothwell admitted that there was a lot more that we could do to identify those vulnerable, and to push out fraud awareness messaging. He spoke of how the real inroads will be made by preventing at source, ‘taking out the enablers’ of fraud. Prosecuting people, he said, was ‘really expensive’ and what most people wanted was not offenders being taken to court, but their money back.
The next twice-weekly webinar is on a related topic, ‘making offenders pay for their crimes’; asset confiscation. You can register to watch webinars for free at https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/. You can also listen to past webinars going back to March 31.
Next week the webinars return to their international feel; on the Tuesday the Kenyan OSPAs are presented, and on Thursday the subject is victims in the criminal justice system, where a UK speaker is Neil Masters, Policy Manager at the anti-fraud trade association Cifas.
