We will only ever be able to look at the most serious cases, as indeed will policing, but I think we will find, as time goes by and we see what is returned and what is not, that there has been a substantial amount of fraud through these schemes. That was Graeme Biggar, director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, based in the National Crime Agency (NCA), giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee of MPs on economic crime, speaking about the billions of pounds in fraud likely to be lost through the furlough support and ‘bounce back’ loan scheme.
He identified fraud against the public sector as ‘the biggest single trend’ in fraud arising from the covid pandemic. On the launching of the support in the spring of 2020, Biggar said that Government then “had pretty hard decisions to make about the balance between reducing fraud risk and getting money out the door to people who really urgently needed it. The decisions they made seem pretty reasonable to me, but inevitably they have resulted in significant fraud risk.”
On the UK as a financial centre being a risk for money laundering, he described the reform of Companies House by Government have as ‘really important’. SARs – suspicious activity reports sent to the authorities by banks – have gone up in the last 20 years from 20,000 a year to hundreds of thousands, which Biggar said were ‘very hard to deal with’. The NECC is increasing the number of people in its financial intelligence unit: “In 2018, it was 80; it is now 140. The plan is to get close to 200.”
Asked whether banks are doing enough to combat economic crime, he said that they were doing ‘an awful lot’, and added that other sectors are important to reducing the threat of fraud in this country; insurance, retail, legal or accountancy. “The tech sector and social media companies also have a really important role, as do telecoms. So it really needs to be everyone coming together to make a real difference.”
On that point of collaboration, he said that traditionally police had looked at fraud on the basis of victim reports. “That is not sufficient. We need to combine it with bank data.”
One of the committee’s MPs, Dame Angela Eagle, called it ‘crime 101’ and asked why things Graeme Biggar had spoken of doing had not happened before now, ‘given the damage being done and the relatively risk-free environment in which fraud is being allowed to fester’. In reply he said that it ‘has ebbed and flowed over the years. We have been better at this in the past.”
He connected fraud with the rise of the internet: “Over recent years, particularly in investment fraud, we have seen very pushy advertisements of investment fraud scams hosted on websites, popping up at the top of Google searches and pushed through social media.” MPs complained that their constituents are ‘bombarded’ with such scams.
Also giving evidence, Angela McLaren, the new City of Londo Assistant Commissioner with responsibility for economic and cyber-crime, acknowledged like Graeme Biggar that fraud policing has been ‘under-resourced historically’.
For the transcript of evidence visit the UK Parliament website.
Graeme Biggar is also featured in the January print edition of Professional Security magazine, as one of the speakers in a recent webinar by the business body Resilience First.
