By Gemma Simpson, 17 August 2007 12:24
NEWS
Businesses must tell the police when they fall victim to e-crime but are often too embarrassed to do so, according to a high-ranking police officer.
Detective chief superintendent Chris Corcoran of North Wales Police, chair of the E-crime Wales Unit and member of the National E-crime Forum, told silicon.com: "We need to get a true picture of the real problem so we can start to resource it properly, start to link in nationally properly and start to take some informed preventative measures."
Corcoran said: "We can't deal with what we don't know about from a police perspective so - unless people tell us - we can't address the problem."
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Police can help by giving e-crime victims advice but businesses and consumers need to come onboard and recognise e-crime is "not high-tech crime but everyday crime", he added.
The UK no longer has a standalone reporting body to deal with e-crime occurrences. Such a body did exist but was incorporated into the Serious and Organised Crime Agency last year.
Wales set up its own e-crime steering group three years ago to begin taking action against cyber crimes and recently rolled out a management team to advise and support e-crime victims.
Corcoran added Welsh businesses are "over the moon" about this service and prefer the personal contact and ownership a region-specific body brings.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
I am sick and tired of seeing 'virus detected' warnings , both from my ISP and my own anti-virus system and also receiving dodgy e-cards and uninvited .zip files. The amount of viruses being sent out is now beyond a joke and it is high time the industry and the law started getting really rouch with the perpitrators and authors. Even when you are well protected it still wastes everone's time.
2. Chris Eyre
We recently averted acceptance of fraudulent Visa and MasterCard payments by a person pretending to be a travel agent in Glasgow using stolen card details: we reported the crime to Glasgow Police offering to give the perpetrator's identity and postal address: their reponse was that we should not be reporting the attempted fraud to them but to our local police here in France: they were totally disinterested in spite of the fact that our information would have led them directly to the criminal's front door. What hope is there of stopping cyber crime, also theft of card identities if the Police (and our own bank's fraud department) are not prepared to follow up good information from victims?
3. Richard Davies
Its easy for them to ask people / businesses to do this, but then they don't do anything anyway!?
I forwarded e-mails etc. to my local police and asked them to forward them onto relevant personnel etc. and they replied stating I should use a firewall and anti-spam software etc.
When you get that kind of response you just don't bother in the future as they don't seem to have a clue!
Also, nobody takes responsability and the buck just seems to go round in circles!!!!