A second annual conference in London by the Fraud Advisory Panel and the regulator the Charity Commission gave charities – including churches, and fee-paying schools – the chance to share ideas and hear best practice.
Pictured are trustees of the Panel, left to right David Stevens, Stephen Hill and Jonathan Holmes. The last speaker of the day, Mike Ashley, a board member of the Charity Commission, stressed the need for charities to communicate. He suggested that charities were more picked on by fraudsters, because they are a soft touch. As a non-executive director of Barclays, he made the point that the bank trawled the ‘dark web’ to see if customer details were for sale there, online. Barclays spent an awful lot of money on preventing cyber crime; a lot more than charities could ever hope to spend; and ‘probably a lot less than the criminals spend’. He called for greater partnership between chairites: “I don’t think any individual charity has the resources to trawl the dark web, to see if its data is for sale, but can the charity sector as a whole do that?” He warned of greater public expectations. On that score, the previous speaker was Gerald Oppenheim, head of policy at the new Fundraising Regulator, set up after the 2015 controversy over persistent and unethical fund-raising efforts on behalf of charities. If that regulator, which began work in July 2016, has a complaint of fraud, it will work with other agencies such as the police, because he said that it did not have the capacity to investigate fraud. Ahead of the European Union’s general data protection regulation (regardless of Brexit) that regulator is working with the data protection regulator the ICO, and hopes to issue guidance before Christmas (on what charities should do with donor data).
And as for the ICO, among the speakers was Chris Plummer, director of strategy at the British Pregnancy Advisory Services, which was given the largest fine by the ICO for a data security breach, of its website. Cyber was a theme for many other speakers, such as Martyn Croft, the CISO at The Salvation Army UK and Brian Shorten, the chairman of the Charities Security Forum; and Richard Kusnierz, of Haymarket Risk Management, on data mining; and Sophie Urquhart, customer security business partner, at RBS, on common scams and social engineering, as used in cheque and invoice fraud.
Other speakers included Diana Isiye, Head of Counter Fraud at Oxfam GB; and Nick Lake, head of internal audit at the Big Lottery Fund. The morning and afternoon conference chairs were Stephen Hill and Michelle Russell, director of investigations at the Charity Commission.
The event like an inaugural one a year ago was at the Royal College of Physicians. The organisers plan like last year to produce a digest of the day. See also the December 2016 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
The conference came at the end of Charity Fraud Awareness Week; which saw the launch of a website, www.charitiesagainstfraud.org.uk, as a point of reference for charities to reduce their vulnerability to fraud.
And the Fraud Advisory Panel runs other events – Martin Robinson of the Panel; Alan Bryce, senior manager – development and intellgence of the Commission; and Pesh Framjee of accountancy firm Crowe Clark Whitehill, a morning speaker at the October 28 conference, are speakers at afternoon seminars on ‘good governance and fraud risk management – a beginner’s guide for smaller charities’. They’re running in London on Thursday, December 8; and Manchester on Wednesday, January 18, 2017. For details ring 020 7920 8637.
