CHAPTER 3: THREATS
Organised crime is international in nature; and through sophisticated use of the
internet criminals can commit crime in the UK from anywhere in the world.16
Fraud and cyber crime
3.25.
Europol commented in late 2014:
“In general cybercrime is increasing in scale and impact; while there is a lack
of reliable figures, trends suggest considerable increases in scope,
sophistication, number and types of attacks, number of victims and economic
damage.
...
Underground forums provide cybercriminals with a nexus for the trade of goods
and services and a hub for networking, creating an organised set of criminal
relationships from an otherwise disparate population.”17
3.26.
Attention was drawn to the exploitation by criminals of legitimate features of the
internet (anonymisation, encryption, virtual currencies), to the increased
sophistication of malware and to the increase of e-commerce related fraud in line with
the growing number of online payments. Europol suggested that the trend towards
cyber crime techniques, even on the part of traditional organised crime groups, “may
reflect how all serious crime will be organised in the future”. The NCA emphasised to
me that the internet has increased the geographical range of organised crime, citing
a recent example of Anglo-Australian criminal collaboration.
3.27.
Europol’s reference to a lack of reliable figures is borne out in the UK: fraud and cyber
crime are not included in the CSEW headline estimates. As the ONS observed in its
January 2015 “stocktake”:
“Advances in technology and the rise of the internet have provided new
opportunities for criminals to commit crime. This has raised questions as to
whether the fall in conventional crimes, as described above, has simply been
replaced by new types of crime that are not yet well measured by the statistics.”
To illustrate the point, the ONS presented an estimate that 5.2% of card owners were
victims of card fraud in the year to September 2014, as against 1% who suffered theft
from the person and 0.2% who suffered robbery. In a survey of 2000 web users last
year by the Get Safe Online organisation, 51% admitted to having been in some way
affected by online cyber scams, such as fraud, ID theft, hacking, online abuse or
having their computer infected with a virus.18 Work is said to be ongoing to incorporate
measures of fraud and cyber crime into the main CSEW estimates.
16
17
18
Evidence from the Home Office, April 2015.
Europol, The Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment, (November 2014).
Get Safe Online survey, October 2014.
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