Just how defeatist are our police over online crime? The top fraud crime fighter in the country, City of London Police commissioner Ian Dyson, won’t agree with that, but he certainly talks down the possibility of arrests and convictions. There’s a bluntness to his assessment that won’t, perhaps, go down too well with the Foreign Office. Crooks in Russia and Ukraine are behind much of it, he says, and law enforcement there won’t cooperate with the British.
It’s a common saying that you can’t put a policeman on every street corner, and we certainly can’t put one on Kreschatik Street or Old Arbat. But arguably our problem is that we tried to put too many bobbies on the beat, with the vogue for neighbourhood policing skewing resources to threats, such as home burglary and car theft, that have actually been in steep decline.
One sound that always greets me when I return to London from abroad is police sirens. New York and Paris are no match for the hyper-visibility and siren volumes of police here, but given the decline in traditional crime (even the terrorism death tolls are lower than in the 1980s) then it’s time to assess whether we need to switch priorities.
The volume of cybercrime now matches the number of traditional crimes, and its estimated £193bn cost is far in excess of the value of physical goods nicked from homes, cars and workplaces. Yet we devote relatively few resources to fighting it. The City of London police force’s budget is around £120m a year, yet it is the country’s lead force on fraud – and also has the not-insignificant duty to protect the likes of St Paul’s, the Tower of London and other high-value targets from terrorism. The commissioner reckons that each £1 spent on fighting fraud prevents around £60 in online theft; even if the reality is that it’s only half that, then it’s still one hell of a return.
More money could go into prevention and disruption, where Dyson thinks the returns are best. My guess is that the public would prefer to see many more arrests and convictions. If crooks think the worst that could happen is their website being prematurely shut down, then it’s hardly much of a deterrent.
Dyson was determinedly uncritical of the banks when I interviewed him. Yet the banks can’t escape the fact that they are the getaway car when it comes to online crime. Without online banking, the money simply can’t be stolen or lured out of your account and into the scammer’s account.
The banks save a colossal sum from shutting their branch networks (eventually they will nearly all go) and making us do the work the bank tellers used to do. We firmly believe that one reform – forcing sort codes and account numbers to be matched with individual names – will go some way to halting a number of frauds. But Dyson doesn’t share our belief that this will change much.
A second reform requires consent as much from the public as from the banks. The “faster payments” system – transferring money instantly – opened up a gold mine for fraudsters. We all like the speed and convenience, but it means there is no time for second thoughts. So often here on Money we hear stories from fraud victims who say they were not quite sure what was going on, and it was a day (or even hours) later when they tried try to block the transaction. But too late, the money had been looted. There is a strong argument for three-day clearance on transfers to new payees, say for sums above £250. And would it be that onerous if all transfers above £1,000 took a day or so to clear?
