Scammers

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

The National Cyber Security Centre launched its suspicious email reporting service to remove harmful scams online, and it is seeing high levels of success. As of October 2022 it had taken down more than 105,000 scams across 192,000 URLs. Another thing that the Government have done is the National Economic Crime Centre’s department dedicated to ensuring consistency of messaging. I will make sure it is aware of my noble friend’s suggestion.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, for many years I was chairman of PayPal Europe. Working with the global head of security, I tried extremely hard to engage the British Government on this issue. With the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and the law enforcement authorities, there was absolutely no traction whatever. No real interest was taken in it. Can the Government now reliably estimate the enormous scale of online fraud, then a contagion and now an epidemic? To what degree are the Government bearing down on the offenders, who operate globally as well as nationally? Can the Minister tell us how many scammers were successfully prosecuted for online fraud in the last year for which figures are available?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I am afraid I cannot. I will endeavour to find the appropriate statistic. There is a problem about the collection of statistics—the noble Lord, Lord Browne, referred to it earlier—which is to do with differences of collection across the four nations, I am afraid. However the noble Lord, Lord Birt, is quite right: it is obviously a serious proportion of crime. I reassure noble Lords once again that the Government are taking this very seriously. As I said earlier, on 2 November the Prime Minister led on this.