By Mark Ballard for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
The report, which examined existing primary data sources about
fraud of all types, noted how unreliable much of the data is and
how difficult it is to aggregate because of inconsistency in
reporting standards.
This has left the police with a dilemma - fraud might be so bad
that if we knew the true extent of the crime we would be daunted by
the impossibility of finding resources to do anything about it.
"In the light of the very low level of current fraud reporting
and the potential enormity of what might follow if victims were
encouraged to report all fraud there is a very real danger of
raising expectations for official action that might not be able to
be met, whether by the police or by any other body," the report
said.
The best estimate the ACPO report could make had it that there
was £1bn of fraud committed against the financial services
industry, £0.93 billion against other businesses, £2.75bn against
private individuals.
A whopping £6.43bn was "conservatively estimated" to have been
defrauded from the public sector at a national level, while just
£0.04bn was defrauded from local bodies.
One of the problems noted in the report is the temptation to
report all sources of fraud as identity fraud, rather than treating
it as a separate category.
Someone stealing and using a credit card is not committing
identity fraud in the same way as someone stealing an identity to
apply for a new credit card.
Michael Levi, professor of social sciences at Cardiff University
and one of the report authors, said that reports describing levels
of identity fraud might be more accurate if they excluded data
about stolen credit cards.
He said while stolen credit cards were still important, chip and
pin card security was squeezing such theft out of the crime
figures. "Criminals might have to make more effort to impersonate
someone."
© The Register
2007
