The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated 10.8 million incidents of crime in the latest survey year, including fraud and computer misuse.
John Flatley, Crime Statistics and Analysis, Office for National Statistics (ONS), said that the figures suggest that the police are dealing with a growing volume of crime. He said: “While improvements made by police forces in recording crime are still a factor in the increase, we judge that there have been genuine increases in crime – particularly in some of the low incidence but more harmful categories.”
“Police figures cannot provide a good measure of all crime in society, since we know that a large volume of it never comes to their attention. The recent increases in recorded crime need to be seen in the context of the overall decline in crime indicated by the Crime Survey for England and Wales.”
While crime estimated by the survey has fallen considerably from the peak levels seen in 1995, but crime dealt with by the police has begun to rise in recent years, according to the ONS. The police recorded 583,782 more offences in the year ending June 2017 than in the previous year. All main categories of police recorded crime increased. Violence against the person offences being dealt with by the police increased in the year ending June 2017; up by 19pc compared with the previous year (from 1,033,719 to 1,229,260).
New victimisation questions on fraud and computer misuse were added into the CSEW from October 2015. Fraud offences reported to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) have been increasing since comparable records started in 2012, the ONS reports. From the CSEW it’s estimated that there were 3.3 million incidents of fraud in the survey year ending June 2017, with over half of these (57pc; 1.9 million incidents) being cyber-related.
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Calum Macleod, Vice Chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, the rank and file police body, said: “I can see little chance of this sorry state of affairs changing any time soon. Every day officers set out to protect their communities from harm but every day their job is being made more difficult with cuts in funding and cuts in numbers but zero cuts in demand. Ultimately the public suffer, as the figures show, and their safety is compromised. We know from our own research that officers suffer significantly at the hands of volatile and dangerous individuals, but these figures paint a disturbing picture of the reality they face when responding to calls for help.
“It is for that exact reason we are pushing for greater protection for officers, through our Protect The Protectors campaign, to improve access to protective equipment like body-worn video and Taser.”
Ryan Wilk, VP at NuData Security, said: “This level of recorded fraud figures is astounding, and bad news for consumers who often bear the brunt of many direct costs and pains – especially in account takeover and new account fraud. The increasing volume of attacks globally has also been attributed to more fraudsters willing to commit the crime, more data available on the black market, and more financial institutions and merchants that are vulnerable to attacks. It’s incumbent upon companies to secure their customers’ trust by keeping their accounts safe from hackers without hurting their customer experience. They can’t afford to hear their customers say, ‘My account got hacked again.’
“To detect out of character and potentially fraudulent transactions before they can create a financial nightmare for consumers, we must adopt new authentication methods that they can’t deceive. Solutions based on consumer behaviour and interactional signals are leading the way to provide more safety for consumers, and less fraud in the marketplace. There are solutions on the market now that can identify machines from humans, then separate good machines from bad, selects known humans from unknown humans, and finally sorts unknown humans demonstrating low-risk signals from unknown humans demonstrating high-risk signals. This process lets organisations fast track the known and low-risk users for an optimal experience, saving the friction and traditional authentication methods for the highest risk users.”
