Tim Harvey –Written evidence (FDF0097)

Thank you for inviting me to share views on digital fraud, the Fraud Act and APP fraud.

By way of introduction, I was the Detective Superintendent of both the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police Economic Crime Departments. I also worked closely with the Home Office when the Fraud Act was being drafted. Indeed, it was at my suggestion that section 6 having an article for use in connection with fraud and section 7, making an article for use in fraud were created. Prior to the Fraud Act there was no legislation that could prevent criminals producing copies of documents, such as law degrees, qualifications, birth, death certificates, driving licences etc. which they did and used extensively in frauds.

When any new technology is introduced, the criminal fraternity test it to destruction and the World Wide Web was no exception. Criminals quickly found ways to exploit the WWW to commit fraud. With it’s introduction there  was no need for thousands of hand written letters posted in Nigeria to names and addresses found in telephone directors to be sent to the UK, (as was the case, many of these were intercepted at Heathrow and destroyed as they has fake postage stamps on them) now e-mail took their place. It was cheaper and quicker and many who had not heard of 419 fraud (419 is the penal code of Nigeria that prohibits fraud) quickly feel victim to it.  Now because it is so widely known anyone who gets an e-mail offering thousands to be paid into your account immediately sends it to their Junk Spam box.  Note the public were gradually made aware and this reduced (although has not prevent all) this type of fraud. Educated.

Criminals quickly found ways to steal our personal details and even our identities. The limit of their frauds is only limited by their imagination. Social engineering has become another essential tool of the fraudster notably preying on the most vulnerable in our society. Authorised push payment fraud like so many other is on the increase. How do we reduce it?  Make the Contingent Reimbursement Model and the Confirmation of Payee mandatory for all financial institutions trading in the UK. Introduce further regulations to cover crypto currencies and Non Fungible Tokens (a subject that could easily be the work for another committee).  Because APP fraud relies on the activities of the victim it is difficult to detect and stop. There are coming on line some technologies that can assist like Biocatch  and other AI applications but the majority of the prevent relies on the training and actions of staff. In my view the most effective form of prevention is education. Statistically if you created a series of very short informative “adverts” to be published on ITV, BBC (maybe get Netflicks on board) you would be spending far less money than that lost by victims to criminals and organised crime, making the UK a safer place to live and do business. Adverts should appear in papers and online news services, RSS feeds should regularly highlight the dangers of transferring funds to anyone you don’t know. When 419 fraud became so widely used , the public (most of them) became educated … the same must be for APP fraud but this time the Government must invest to protect.

Whilst most frauds are re-hashed old frauds, we have seen some new ones emerge due to our technological age examples are binary trading, romance scams, grandparent fraud, Initial Coin Offerings, Non Fungible Token frauds etc the list is endless and criminals created new ways to part victims from their money. A massive education policy is the only long term solution, the problem has grown to epidemic proportions and it is impossible to arrest or regulate our way out of it education is the way forward.

16 September 2022