Police launch £1bn-worth of e-crime investigations
Cops stick virtual boot to cyber criminals
Published: 25 March 2009 17:33 GMT by Nick Heath
Show related articlesThe City of London Police (Colp) force has launched £1bn-worth of computer crime investigations over the last year, it was revealed this week.
During its first year in operation as the National Lead Police Force for Fraud it has hired 50 new investigators and taken on 70 new cases of suspected fraud involving computers, the e-Crime Congress 2009 event heard today.
Colp commissioner Mike Bowron told the Congress: "Those 70 cases would previously not have been investigated and with a combined loss of over £1bn."
The cases include a suspected insider trader at a bank where €95m had gone missing and a father and daughter accused of defrauding Britons of £35m in a boiler-room scam.
A tranche of specialist policing units, including the National Lead Police Force for Fraud, are now focusing on collating reports and co-ordinating investigations into cybercrime nationwide - among them, the National Fraud Reporting Centre (NFRC), National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) and the Police Central E-crime Unit (PCeU).
The PCeU is already working with government agencies, businesses and banks on investigations into "top end" cyber attacks, including distributed denial of service and malware attacks on key systems, Metropolitan Police Service deputy assistant commissioner Janet Williams revealed.
Later this year Colp will launch the NFRC, a single phone contact centre and web portal that will handle all reports of online and other fraud.
Bowron said: "The NFRC will as never before ensure that reports of computer fraud are recorded, whether it is somebody who has lost £5 in an online auction house or had their bank account emptied in a phishing attack."
The NFRC is feeding intelligence into the NFIB, where it is analysed for patterns and trends, and the PCeU, which will co-ordinate and lead investigations into cybercrime.
Williams, who is also Association of Chief Police Officers lead for e-crime, said the £7m PCeU, the NFRC and the NFIB would provide the bedrock for fighting e-crime in the UK.
"I do not think that anybody would think that the amount of money we have at the moment will meet the threat," she said.
"But we can use the money we have got to build a capability across the country to establish a reporting centre for the public, to provide regional e-crime centres that can deal with the packages of intelligence that come out of that, and work with industry to ensure we are a match for the more serious and pernicious cyber criminals."
Williams told the congress that PCeU officers are in talks with the financial sector about the types of online attack that banks are suffering.
"Some serious criminals are getting stronger and stronger and we are just patching up the damage afterwards. To solve the problems we have to share data about how these attacks are occurring to understand how big these threats are," she said.
After May the PCeU will focus its attention on how cybercriminals are targeting the UK retail industry, according to Williams.
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