The UK needs a multi-million pound advertising campaign to warn people against online fraud, the Association of Security Consultants’ annual conference Consec heard yesterday.
Chris Greany, the new national co-ordinator for economic crime at City of London Police, said: “We need a campaign of prevention; we need to look at how to bring the intelligence together, and we need to really take care of people who through no faulty of their own have lost all their life savings.” When asked from the floor of the Heathrow event who would pay, and when, Greany repeated a point that given the millions of online crimes, ‘we can’t just keep trying to enforce’. “I think industry are keen to be involved, Government are definitely keen to be involved.” Such a campaign might cost £10m, he added. Speaking of the latest official England and Wales crime survey, that gave an estimate of 5.1m frauds in a year, Greany said that police could not investigate them all, and enforcement was expensive and dealing with symptoms and not the cause. “This is the time now for a campaign on the scale of the seat belt campaign,” which took years to get into people’s psyche, he said. A national campaign was the only way to prevent ‘economic crime’ – fraud – on a UK-scale, especially against consumers, he added. The advertising would advise people how not to be tricked by phone calls supposedly from banks – ask which bank and who’s speaking, then put the phone down and ring your bank with the number on your statement, he suggested. As for phishing emails, Greany pointed out that people will open an email, even one that says it’s from a bank that they don’t bank with. Greany said that he wanted to bring banks and police closer together to analyse trends.
Not victimless
Greany set out how fraud was not victimless; banks would pay back victims, but the criminals had the money; so the money came from us. Copyright theft – such as counterfeits – meant that when someone bought a fake handbag or training shoes, that money bought heroin, or trafficked children.
Among other speakers
Among other speakers, Rear-Admiral John Kingwell, of the Development, concepts and doctrine centre at the Ministry of Defence, gave a ‘global security forecast to 2045’. The annual conference at the Marriott Heathrow was chaired by recently-retired SIA chief executive Bill Butler. An Imbert award for the person nominated by four industry associations – the Security Institute, ASIS UK, the BSIA and IPSA – went to the past chairman of IPSA, Mike White. And John Thorpe, a civil engineer and founder member of the ASC, was made a honorary life member.
Next meeting
The ASC has its next meeting, a business group, at the London Chamber of Commerce offices on Thursday morning, November 19. For more about the ASC, visit http://securityconsultants.org.uk/ or email [email protected].
