One morning last week, in the early hours, I received a puzzling text from my bank. ‘Did you use your debit card at 01.23 at Tenorshare.com?’ it said. I’d never heard of Tenorshare before – it’s a smartphone support service apparently – and had certainly never knowingly made any payments to them. But someone had attempted to, by using my bank card details. When I contacted my bank, I was asked about another payment, to Wetherspoons, at ten to midnight on a Saturday night. Once again: not me, I was asleep in bed.
The crimes that take place away from the streets deserve attention too
‘We’re blocking your card and sending you a new one,’ said the assistant on the phone. ‘Your card details must have got onto the dark web from a data leak.’
Ah, the dark web, that hidden part of the internet accessed only through specialist software and frequented, it is said, by crypto-currency traders, computer hackers, fraudsters and people seeking child abuse images. The idea that my card details were circulating in that secretive online world is chilling.
Crime is high on the government’s agenda, but their focus has been on neighbourhood policing – not fraud. A pledge to boost the number of police dedicated to working in communities by 13,000 over the next five years formed the centrepiece of the ‘Plan for Change’ set out by Keir Starmer earlier this month.
There is, of course, a powerful argument to say that we do need more ‘bobbies on the beat’ to provide reassurance to communities, collect local intelligence and help prevent crimes. Neighbourhood policing is the foundation of the UK’s model of law enforcement and rebuilding it undoubtedly has voter appeal. But at a time when public sector resources are so tight, the financial commitment required to fulfil the pledge, when so many crimes are being committed on laptops and smartphones, is questionable. In the first year alone, it will cost £100 million – and that’s just to pay the salaries of the first 1,200 officers. Thousands more will need to be hired or re-deployed in the years that follow.
But, as a new report published in the same week as the Prime Minister’s announcement revealed, it is identity fraud – the online crime I was a victim of – that is causing just as much, if not more, concern. The study, jointly authored by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and the fraud prevention service CIFAS describes identity fraud as a ‘growing threat’. It’s estimated to cost the UK an estimated £1.8 billion each year, with at least 237,000 incidents recorded by banks, insurers, shops and telecoms companies in 2023. It includes cases like mine, where personal information is stolen or compromised for financial gain, and also those where stolen identity details are used to facilitate serious crimes such as money laundering, terrorism, drug trafficking and people smuggling.
Over the past decade, identity fraud has been allowed to grow unchecked, the report says, ‘like a frog being slowly boiled over time’, with criminals exploiting our increasing reliance on digital services and now taking advantage of advances in artificial intelligence.
‘At an industry level, there was unanimous agreement that the problem was on the cusp of acceleration, given the easier access for criminals to AI and deepfake technologies that facilitate high-quality document manipulation,’ the report says. The ease with which voices and faces can be reproduced is arguably the most alarming development of all.
Although CIFAS and RUSI’s report recommends legislative changes and improvements to data sharing, it also makes clear that the police must nevertheless up their game. At an operational level identity fraud has been ‘under-prioritised’ by police, said experts consulted for the study. ‘Law enforcement professionals were sometimes more reticent to investigate identity theft – whether due to unwillingness, lack of knowledge, or both – than they were to investigate the crime that was committed with the stolen identities,’ it noted.
The findings echo those of previous studies which have looked at the police response to digitally-enabled crime and fraud more generally: ‘low priority’ is the thread that runs through them all. In 2021, the policing watchdog, HM Inspectorate of Police, Fire and Rescue Services, said the ‘fundamental problem’ was a ‘disparity’ between the amount of work fraud creates for the police and the resources allocated to it, even though people were more likely to be victims of fraud than any other crime. Figures, cited by the Public Accounts Committee in a 2023 report, illustrate that stark disparity: ‘Despite making up 41 per cent of all crime…only around 1 per cent of police personnel are dedicated to fraud,’ it said.
Under the new government, the script shows little sign of changing. Fraud received the barest of mentions in Labour’s election manifesto – just one paragraph – and the new ‘expanded strategy’ that it promised has so far failed to materialise. As the new crop of ministers is finding out, there are no easy choices in government. But the commitment to boost local policing must not come at the cost of an enhanced service for victims of identity fraud and cyber crime. Research last year for the criminal justice consultancy Crest Advisory, based on a sample of 3,300 people, suggests the public are more worried about online fraud than any other type of crime. Knife crime and burglary were second and third.
The phrase ‘Safer Streets’ is a catchy slogan that neatly encompasses Labour’s priorities of clamping down on antisocial behaviour, shop theft and violence by bolstering neighbourhood policing. But the crimes that take place away from the streets deserve attention too. Payment card scams do not make headlines in the way that stabbings and burglaries do but fraud, identity theft in particular, is the engine room of criminality – and the government ignores it at its peril.
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