Cyber-Fraud in the UK

Nickie Aiken Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) for securing this timely debate.

The scale of fraud and cyber-crime is remarkable, affecting more people more often than any other crime. It represents more than a third of all estimated crime, with 6.1 million incidents in England and Wales in the year ending September 2020. Eighty per cent of reported fraud is facilitated by the use of digital technology and the coronavirus pandemic means so many more of us are using online services to shop and invest and for leisure. As our habits change, so do those of criminals.

I believe that life on the internet should be as safe as our lives offline. If being exploited on the high street is unacceptable, the same must apply to vendors who operate online. I am proud that the City of London Police, based in my constituency, is the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for economic and cyber-crime and the national lead force for fraud. It works to investigate serious, complex and cross-border fraud, which is beyond the capability of a local police force, and provides training for such police forces and private sector workforces through its Economic Crime Academy. With the support of the City of London Corporation and stakeholders, including UK Finance, the City of London Police has consistently shown how it can harness and work with the private sector to tackle cyber-fraud, providing a bridge for law enforcement into financial institutions and, importantly now, into the FinTech sector.

I welcome the draft Online Safety Bill announced in the recent Queen’s Speech, which I hope will do much to tackle cyber-fraud. Indeed, the inclusion of fraud within the legislation will provide much needed encouragement for online service providers to take responsibility for protecting users of their services and implementing counter-fraud strategies to prevent malicious content. That is essential in a time when we have become even more dependent on making our digital defences robust and capable of dealing with the volume of fraud that we are now seeing. By the same token, if we are seeing cyber-fraud more often replacing traditional crime, we must allocate the relevant resources to reflect this new significance.

Equally, the City of London Police, which holds the unique role in this landscape, must be properly funded so it can continue upholding its national responsibilities. That said, online fraud need not be as sophisticated; online threats can and do spring from almost anywhere. Last year, the City of London Police alone requested suspension of 54,000 telephone, email, website and social media accounts. Facebook, Amazon, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and LinkedIn are the platforms that feature most frequently in fraud and cyber-crime reports, and I am sure all of us in this room use at least one of those platforms every day. The challenge is immense, and online service providers must take more responsibility to protect users of their services and implement counter-fraud strategies.

The suspicious email reporting service, developed in partnership with the National Cyber Security Centre, has received nearly 6 million reports in the past year, resulting in the removal of more than 43,000 scams and 86,000 URLs, including those linked to covid-19, investment and online shopping fraud. I have used the excellent service myself, forwarding suspicious emails to report@phishing. gov.uk, and texting 7726. We all have a part to play in ensuring that those fraudsters are closed down as soon as possible.

Clearly, updating the framework by which we enforce against cyber-fraud is a priority for this Government, and I welcome their conviction on that, but the solution is not one-dimensional. We all have a role to play in fraud prevention. We know not to leave our doors unlocked, our possessions visible in our cars or our telephones on a table when we are out eating. We know that to keep ourselves safe, we have to take a degree of personal responsibility. The same needs to be replicated online. People, no matter what their age, should be taught how to keep themselves safe online.

Although there is more that can be done and, critically, is being done centrally, greater priority must be placed on fraud at a local policing level. Too few of the cases disseminated to local forces for investigation by Action Fraud have actually reached a judicial outcome. Simply increasing capability, capacity and focus centrally will not address the substantial shortfall in local police forces to take cases forward. Now more than ever, there needs to be a drive to boost local police capacity and ensure consistency of approach. I am glad to see the Government respond with strength on this issue. It is my hope that strength does not wane, but is fortified to protect our citizens against aggressive and malicious abuses of technology.