Barry Sheerman – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Sheerman on 2015-12-07.
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to improve the system for reporting cybercrime.
Mike Penning
Action Fraud is the national reporting centre for fraud and cyber crime, and takes reports on behalf of all police forces in England and Wales. In June, it was extended to cover Northern Ireland. Action Fraud was set up to improve reporting of what has traditionally been an under-reported crime type. Official figures support the decision to centralise reporting: in the year ending June 2015, recorded fraud offences more than trebled from 72,000 before the centralisation of reporting to over 230,000.
Action Fraud works in conjunction with the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB): as of April 2014 both are operated by the City of London Police, the national lead force for fraud, which means one organisation is responsible for the whole process of taking reports and analysing them. The NFIB analyses Action Fraud crime reports and attempts to match them with other crimes and identify viable lines of enquiry so that an intelligence package can be passed to the police force best able to launch an investigation (usually where the suspect is believed to be located).
Not all crimes recorded by Action Fraud and analysed by the NFIB will have viable investigative leads: fraudsters and cyber criminals may be based overseas or use false details. Nevertheless, in 2014/15, the number of crimes sent to police forces was almost 62,000. This was an increase of over 50% on 2013/14. The City of London Police are working with local forces to share expertise on how to investigate these types of crimes. City of London Police will be introducing a new IT system in May 2016, comprising of a new and much easier to use online reporting tool and a new data analytics platform within the NFIB. It will improve the identification of viable crimes to be passed to police forces, and the ability to provide improved victim service and care.
