Cyber Crime Is Over 50% Of All Reported Crime

Ignorance and misplaced priorities in government and law enforcement, f is allowing cyber-crime to run rampant. Only three in 1,000 cyber-crimes are actually prosecuted, the actual ratio could be closer to three in 100,000 as the FBI is thought to underestimate the extent of cyber crime.

Mieke Eoyang a long-time US government policy adviser of the national security program at the think tank Third Way recently spoke at the 2020 Enigma conference in San Francisco and made the case for allocating more time and money to finding and snaring Internet crooks, hauling them into court, and shutting down this criminality.

Eoyang said police and agents are either told not to pursue online fraudsters or not given the training and resources to do so.

One key problem, Eoyang argued, is that police officers, at the city to state level, lack the basic skills to pursue online crimes, and instead hand cases off to overworked and undermanned specialized cybercrime units.

As a result, in many cases, cybercrime falls through the cracks, considered too big for your neighborhood plod and not significant enough to catch the attention of elite federal or national cyber-crime investigation teams.

One solution would be to expand the skill set of rank-and-file officers to include basic IT and data security techniques.

It was also recently revealed that up to half of all reported financial crime is either fraud or cyber-crime, and that this growing exponentially year on year, despite fraud being hugely underreported and only one in eight cases being investigated.

Speaking at another recent conference Commissioner Ian Dyson of the City of London Police, emphasised this point at the event, by stating “75% of all fraud crimes reported are cyber-enabled. It’s now a lot easier than robbing a bank and the rewards are far greater”.

Dyson’s warnings were echoed by speakers from the FCA, the UK National Fraud Intelligence Bureau and HM Treasury, and more, who suggested that London is becoming the ‘money laundering capital of the world and that detection is a prevalent challenge with external and internal auditing picking up 4% and 16% of fraud respectively and whistleblowing unmasking up to 40% of issues.

Criminals often have equally sophisticated technology at their disposal as law enforcement  orgnisations do, to ensure the protection of firms and their clients from evolving new techniques and technologies.

Numerous ways to protect firms and clients were also discussed on the day from industry-wide co-operation in sharing information to new police and governmental efforts to issues such as training your staff and educating clients to counteract ‘the human threat’.

Speaking about the cost and scale of fraud Max Bruce, Cyber Protect Officer of the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, said that 741,000 crimes of fraud were reported last year, from up to the total value of £2.2b in victim losses, with only 35% of reports from individual victims. He said that 86% of fraud was cyber-enabled; 33% by mobile/telephone, 13% online shopping, 12% email, and the importance of staying vigilant to growing mandate fraud.

Mandate fraud was said to affect businesses year on year, with over 8,300 reports last year and a reported loss of £180m.

Criminals netted $3.5bn (£2.7bn) from cyber-crimes reported to the FBI alone in 2019, according to the service's Internet Crime Complaint Centre. It received 467,361 complaints from individuals and businesses during the year and has had nearly five million since its inception in 2000.

Business Matters Magazine:      The Register:       BBC:       Image: gerallt

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