Government warns of dodgy sales channels

THE NATIONAL FRAUD Strategic Authority is planning to tell businesses which of their sales channels, and even which of their people, are most vulnerable to fraud.

Launched after the Attorney General's Fraud Review of 2006, the
Authority is still setting up its central intelligence unit, which will
only succeed if it gets the co-operation of industry.

Arshad Rahman, assistant director of the Attorney General's National Fraud Strategy, said he was trying to recruit industries to take part in a pilot of its business fraud intelligence system.

The National Fraud Reporting Centre and Intelligence Bureau would take pool of frauds and analyse the data for trends and vulnerabilities, including which people and delivery channels were proving the most susceptible.

"So we can go back to industry and say, 'look guys, this channel you are using is vulnerable,'" he said.

Mark Ancell, general manager of credit reference agency of Graydon UK, said the IT industry would back the scheme.

"We have been doing something like this with Operation Sterling, with Companies House, for over a year," he said.

Rahman said the NFSA wanted to go one step further.

"We want to bring previously uncompared data together, joining the dots. Different entities compile information about fraud and keep it for their own purposes. We want to look across industries," he said.

He concurred with those in the IT trade who say the police were often not much help in investigating fraud.

"Today you call up the police, [but] the chances of them investigating are quite small. They'll give you a crime number and that's the last you'll hear of it because, frankly, they have other priorities," he said.

The NFSA, however, will be dependent on the co-operation of industry.

"The main reason businesses and industries are going to provide us with information is if we give something back. We want to develop a close partnership with industry," he said.

Earlier attempts to get police and industry co-operating over fraud have floundered. A unit designed to protect industry from
card-not-present fraud, the Payments Industry and Police Joint
Intelligence Unit, is running a year late because it wasn't able to get industry to hand over its data.

This has always been the case, the Fraud Review noted in 2006. Like the IT industry, the financial industry has usually preferred to keep incidents of fraud under its hat.

"They seldom involve the police when they discover fraud," it said.