Scammer crime gangs use cost of living to lure victims

The cost of living could be the next frontline for scammers, the head of the UK's specialist police unit for fraud has warned, with criminals using the crisis as a way to lure potential victims.

DCI Gary Robinson, head of the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit DCPCU, said he thought fraudsters could seize on the financial squeeze to persuade people to hand over their personal details.

He said that criminals are using the cost of living crisis to social-engineer people, and they might send messages offering rebates on gas and electricity and playing on people's vulnerabilities.

Robinson was speaking to the Guardian as the DCPCU marked its 20th anniversary and prepared to release figures showing that 2021 was a record year for fraud prevention.

The finance industry funded the unit, consisting of officers from the City and Metropolitan police forces together with members of the banking industry, blocked 101 m worth of crime last year in operations targeting gangs. Investigations into scams and frauds involving bank customers resulted in 123 arrests and disrupted the activities of 23 organised criminal gangs.

Robinson said that the Fraudsters tend to switch to when they move with the times, whatever is the latest trend. We started with vaccines and went to tax rebates as people were working from home, then back to vaccines and then to delivery scams as people were shopping online. We saw an increase in romance scams as people were lonely at home. The unit's work resulted in several convictions related to Covid scams, including one person who had harvested victims details by sending out texts pretending to be from the NHS.

The 101 m figure for prevention was based on the estimated value of a crime that would have taken place if the unit did not seized data or equipment such as devices containing personal data and card skimming tools.

Robinson said the unit had benefited from the increased support of social media and telecoms in tracking down criminals, who were increasingly reliant on technology to find their victims. Years ago, we would execute a warrant and when entering the property, there would be an old-style filing cabinet that you could pull out and find stolen cards and counterfeit cheques, he said. Things happen now in a faceless way. During the epidemic, fraud levels soared and last year UK Finance reported 754 m had been stolen from bank customers in just six months.

Robinson said that the unit, which focuses on the organised crime gangs behind frauds, took time to work through, in part because of the scale of the fraudsters operations.

He said that his desire is not to just take out the low-level criminals but to climb to the top of the tree. The shared intelligence resulting from the unit, and its 20 years of experience, made this possible.

Many of the crimes involved bank insiders, which were perhaps placed there by organised gangs, but many involved scammers pretending to be from banks and building societies fraud departments.

Robinson said that his work had made him wary of calls he received. My bank rang me the other day about a transaction and my initial thought was: Is this my bank? He said something. He said he always stopped and made checks first rather than responding straight away. It's OK to reject, refuse or ignore any requests that they make.