Downside up

Timon Molloy, Editor

We will have to wait till January for official figures on how much fraud costs the UK; that is when the National Fraud Authority promises a comprehensive report. In the meantime, though, there are plenty of grim statistics to confirm the expectation that recessions not only expose bad judgement during the boom times but also offer fraudsters fresh opportunities to innovate and adapt. Identity fraud, for example, rose 36%, and account takeovers were up 23% in the first nine months of 2009, according to CIFAS, the UK’s fraud prevention service. [1] In part these rises may be explained by tighter lending criteria, which means a declining return on false applications; much better then to ride on someone else’s clean credit rating.