Attorney General Says Britain Is Not Doing Enough To Combat Internet Fraud
With more than 50% of Britons now making a credit card purchase on the Internet, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, recently criticised British authorities for failing to help tackle the growing problem of Internet fraud. Of particular concern to Lord Goldsmith was a general failure in the UK to centrally report, monitor and investigate Internet fraud, which in-turn resulted in the problem growing unchecked.
With Internet fraud accounting from approximately 8% of all reported fraud in the UK last year, many would argue that Lord Goldsmith has a very valid point when he says the time has come to adopt a central Internet fraud recording and investigating system along the lines currently being used the USA’s Internet Crime Complaints Centre (IC3) and Canada’s Reporting Economic Crime Online (RECOL) centre.
Moreover, with more and more Britons expected to use their credit cards to purchase items over the Internet each year – last year the British public spent over £22 billion online, which was an increase of £6 billion on the year before – and with approximately three-quarters of all online purchases being made via a UK credit card, consumer confidence in the ability to use a credit card to make a purchase on the Internet is of paramount importance. Clearly, under the existing system, concern about possible fraudulent use of our credit card details is high among the many millions of us who currently use the Internet to make purchases.
A centralized nation-wide call centre reporting number, operated 24/7, to report all types of Internet fraud, including online credit card fraud, is clearly a sensible move and should be keenly supported by anyone who has ever used their UK credit card to make an online purchase in the past.
With the new Chip and PIN making traditional credit card fraud schemes less profitable to UK fraudsters, more and more UK fraudsters are turning their attention to the Internet. Thus, under the current system, it would not be too difficult to see how “fraudsters benefit from this lack of continuity of response”, as Lord Goldsmith commented in his report. What, at all costs, we do need to avoid is having a situation where “Internet fraud is a particularly good example of how fraud can become difficult to report” – otherwise we may well be facing a very real problem where nobody wants to use their UK credit card online. Implementing the recommendations set out in the Attorney General’s report may very well be a vital step in turning the tide of rising UK Internet fraud.
Richard Smith
3rd August 2006
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