It’s the time of year – in any year, let alone during one so tumultuous and yet oddly hard to remember as 2020 – for reflection. Here we continue our review – because while the covid-19 pandemic has changed so many things, in security practice and life generally, that’s been far from the only threat and risk around. Indeed, we could be in the midst of another, financial crime pandemic – thanks to adaptable and opportunistic fraudsters.
Ben Fletcher, Director of the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB), said: “With Covid-19 causing so many people to lose out financially it sadly means there are more opportunities for insurance scammers to exploit the vulnerable. These fraudsters don’t care who suffer – from the elderly to key workers, we’ve seen them get targeted.
“It’s never been more important to raise public awareness of insurance fraud which is why we’re launching the ‘Stop the Scams’ campaign. If anyone sees something that doesn’t look right, they should report it to the IFB Cheatline.”
Evidence of an insurance scam can be reported to the IFB’s confidential and anonymous Cheatline (powered by the crime reporting line, the charity Crimestoppers) on 0800 422 0421 or online.
The authorities general, while admitting that frauds are too numerous for more than the most serious – or the ‘low hanging fruit’ – to be chased by law enforcement, stress the need for good cyber hygiene, to avoid being tricked by fraudsters in the first place. Hence the advice that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is; and the official Take Five to Stop Fraud campaign.
As an OSPAs thought leadership webinar heard yesterday afternoon, much of the frauds in the UK – and it’s the largest single crime type – has an online element. You can catch up with past OSPAs webinars online. Tomorrow afternoon’s webinar, free to sign up for, is about asset confiscation – as organiser Prof Martin Gill points out, all too often such work has fallen short of public expectations to deliver large sums, or to make offenders feel the threat is real.
Dmitry Bestuzhev, a security researcher at the cyber firm Kaspersky, said: “This year was substantially different from any other year we experienced, and yet, many trends that we anticipated to come to life last year came true regardless of this transformation of how we live.
“These include new strategies in financial cybercrime – from reselling bank access to targeting investment applications — and the further development of already existing trends, for instance, even greater expansion of card skimming and ransomware being used to target banks. Forecasting upcoming threats is important, as it enables us to better prepare to defend ourselves against them, and we are confident our forecast will help many cybersecurity professionals to work on their threat model.”
The December 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine free to read online features the recent annual charity fraud awareness week, run by the Charity Commission, the regulator; and the Fraud Advisory Panel, itself a charity.
The Panel is running a virtual conference on February 2 and 3; visit https://www.thefraudconference.com/.
While governments generally, not only in the UK, handed out ‘bounce back’ loans and wages for furloughed workers, with few if any due diligence checks – for example against multiple claims – Mark Cheesman, deputy director, public sector fraud, at the Cabinet Office was remarkably upbeat and confident when speaking online to a FinCrime World Forum earlier this week.
More on counter-fraud in the January 2021 print edition.
