Crime and Policing

Tijs Broeke, Chair of the City of London Police Authority Board, has called for every police officer to be trained in providing advice and support to victims of fraud.

Speaking at the City of London Police Authority Board Dinner where police, business leaders, and security personnel attended, Mr Broeke said, “If local police officers don’t know how to deal with the highest volume crime type in the country, we must ask ourselves how can a victim who has just lost £100 through courier fraud feel supported?”

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has today executed a search warrant and seized 12 potentially luxury watches at a home in Dorset as part of a proceeds of crime investigation, related to a suspected £76 million care home fraud.

SFO officers, with support from Dorset Police, attended a home in Dorset where they recovered watches branded as Patek Philippe, Rolex and Hublot, worth over £500,000 if authentic.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) should be replaced with a new body dedicated to combating economic crime, a new paper by think tank Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) has argued.

The paper, which was focused on the UK anti-fraud agency, concluded that after “series of institutional failures” it should be replaced.

Criminals and fraudsters are only becoming more tech-savvy; if we want to stop them, so must we, writes Lord Mayor Michael Mainelli

Criminals are harnessing the latest tech. So the police must too (cityam.com)

The launch date for the repeatedly delayed replacement service for Action Fraud, the much-criticized reporting center for fraud and financially motivated cybercrime in Britain, has again been pushed back, a senior police officer has confirmed to Recorded Future News.

The likely date will be sometime in the spring of 2025, according to Nik Adams, the temporary assistant commissioner at the City of London Police.

Today, the National Crime Agency can reveal that they have shut down a platform used by hundreds of criminals to defraud victims across the world.

Russian Coms, established in 2021, is thought to be behind financial losses in the tens of millions. An estimated 170,000 people across the UK are believed to be victims.

A ‘ground-breaking’ public-private intelligence-sharing partnership has been established to use banking data to laser in on criminality.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has announced that it is working with seven UK retail banks – including Starling Bank, which describes itself as ‘Britain’s first digital bank’ – on what it describes as a ‘major project to identify and take action against organised crime’.

Earlier this month, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) published its new strategy for the next five years. This follows on from Nick Ephgrave's promise of a bold new approach in his inaugural public address as director of the SFO. However, scratch the surface and much of the content and rhetoric in these recent pronouncements has a very familiar look to it.

https://www.mondaq.com/uk/white-collar-crime-anti-corruption--fraud/1479946/sfos-five-year-strategy-an-innovative-new-plan-or-a-case-of-d%C3%A9j%C3%A0-vu-all-over-again

Last month Nick Ephgrave, the new director of the Serious Fraud Office, set out his vision for an organisation whose success has otherwise been limited by challenges.

While many of the SFO chief’s proposals are not new to regulators in other jurisdictions or to lawyers representing businesses being investigated, the SFO finally appears to be taking steps to level the playing field for its benefit.

A series of funding deals between private entities and City of London Police to help fight fraud highlights the ongoing funding pressures faced by the police force, experts have said.

City of London Police received more than £13m a year for the last three years through “commercial partnerships”, according to summaries of its accounts, which, depending on the financial year, make up around seven per cent of the force’s total budget.