Fears raised that card fraud could escape investigation
New rules on the way that card fraud is reported could see a drop in the number of crimes being investigated by the police, it has been claimed.
The rules, which came into effect in April, mean that it is now the responsibility of banks, rather than individual victims, to decide whether a complaint about card fraud should be passed to the police.
However, a report on BBC2’s Newsnight found that two police forces – Gwent and North Yorkshire – have received not a single case of card fraud to investigate during the time that the rules have been in force.
The new crime reporting structure was introduced as a result of last year’s Fraud Review which recommended a national centre to handle complaints of fraud. But with the centre still at an initial stage, and the entire reporting process yet to bed down, there are fears that the recording of card fraud will fall and the status of the crime, by implication, downgraded.
Critics argue that last year alone some £430 million was stolen as a result of credit and debit card fraud, representing a problem on a serious scale.
The Home Office defended the decision to hand reporting responsibility to the banks as a way of freeing the police to focus on cases that were more likely to be resolved favourably.
A spokesman for the Home Office said: “The government is determined to tackle the problem of card fraud, whether the account holder is an individual or multi-million pound organisation, and we are working closely with finance and retail sectors along with the police to tackle this crime.”
He added: “On occasions where financial institutions recognise there is insufficient evidence to support a police investigation they may choose not to report a crime. These changes to reporting procedures ensure that police resources can be directed at fraudulent activity that is more likely to result in a positive outcome. As always individual police forces will decide how best to allocate resource for dealing with crime.”
The banks, which did not ask for the change to the reporting rules, also denied that the new system would lead to decriminalisation.
Sandra Quinn of Apacs, the UK trade association for payments, said: “We’re not reporting every single fraud to every single police force because we know that historically the police forces have not been able to deal with every single incidence and they’re not going to be in the future either. What the new rules are doing is replicating what was happening in the past.”
Ms Quinn pointed out that hundreds of cases were still being passed to the police every month.
She added: “As an industry we have a vested interest in making sure card fraud is investigated and the fraudsters prosecuted.”
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