Fraud Intelligence

With ransomware posing the most significant cyber threat in the United Kingdom, hundreds of businesses each year face the dilemma of how to respond to a raid on their valuable data. After seeing increasing numbers of ransoms disbursed, the Information Commissioner's Office and National Cyber Security Centre have stepped in with a joint letter to the legal profession to discourage such payments. Rhiannon Webster and Will Chalk of Ashurst report on the guidance along with requirements under the law.

Enforcement action to tackle foreign bribery, in compliance with the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, declinedfrom 2018 to 2021, according to Transparency International (TI), after reviewing 47 leading exporting economies.

In the event of economic crime, how an organisation comes through may be as much down to how it manages disclosures and responds to questions from different stakeholders as to the quality of any forensic investigation. Ryan McSharry of Infinite Global offers a primer in crisis comms.

British banking trade association UK Finance is warning that "the level of fraud in the UK has reached a point where it must be considered a national security threat". In its '2022 half year fraud update', it says that despite spending billions on fraud prevention, "the banking sector cannot solve this on its own".

The UK Government has promised a Fraud Action Plan before the year is out: it can't come soon enough - the House of Commons Justice Committee describes an "epidemic of fraud cases in England and Wales", now topping 40% of all recorded crime, in its latest report. The Economic Crime Plan 2019-22 estimated fraud costs to the UK at UK?4.7 billion annually, but that was before Covid-19: the latest National Audit Office report into employment support schemes reckons the loss to fraud and error was UK?4.5 billion. Peers are also seized of the issue: the House of Lords Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee notes, in a separate report, published on 12 November, that Office of National Statistics figures show fraud in the year to end of March 2022 to be 25% higher than for the year to end of March 2020.

More than 60% of police officers surveyed worldwide ranked crimes such as money laundering, ransomware, phishing and online frauds as high or very high threats, in Interpol's first-ever Global Crime Trend report. Furthermore, more than 70% expect crimes such as ransomware and phishing attacks to increase or significantly increase over the next three to five years.