[oefrha]

From TFA:

> While security experts and senior bankers said many fraud attacks could be traced overseas - including from India and West Africa - Britain is also increasingly exporting attacks.

> ...

> "It's popular to say the fraud threat is imported into the UK, and I don't think that bears analysis," said NECC's Reed. "There is a significant UK nexus to a lot of fraud, our operational experience is showing that."

[avianlyric]

From personal experience working on this problem I would strongly agree with idea that a lot of bank fraud is home grown.

The police in the UK have a very poor track record of actually dealing with bank fraud. The nature of the crime, and way UK policing works, means there's a significant number of disincentives to actually investigating bank fraud. Two of the biggest showstoppers is location/jurisdiction and training, which police force should investigate? The one where the victim lives, or the one where the criminal lives? Police training focuses almost entirely on crimes with a physical element, if someone robbed your store, then the police know how to help. If they rob your bank account, they haven't foggiest on where to start that kind of investigation.

Additionally each individual case of fraud tends to be for small amounts (thousands to tens of thousands), so are frequently ignored. It's only in aggregate that the sums become meaningful to police, but they rarely consider fraud on anything other than a case-by-case basis. The result, as a bank we can tell the police exactly who commited a crime, where they live, what they look like, where they eat breakfast, what their social media handles are etc, and nothing will happen. The report and all the data vanishes into the blackhole known as the NCA.

[aix1]

This reminds me of how I used to get fake passports.

There was a period when almost every day I had Royal Mail drop through my letterbox envelopes containing various fake documents (passports, driving licences, National Insurance letters, ID cards from various EU counties). Someone was mailing those from a nearby post office and putting my address on the back of the envelopes as the sender. A fraction could not be delivered and got returned to the "sender", some having travelled to, and returned from, other countries.

I reported this several times, both to Action Fraud and to the police. At some point I spent an entire Friday evening sitting at a local police station, thinking that, if I brought the documents to them in person, the police would be less inclined to think I was some crackpot making the whole thing up. I also thought that the fact the documents were being mailed from a post office across the road from the police station might pique their interest (the letters had tracking numbers and so I could look up their journeys on the Royal Mail web site).

In the end this turned out to be a waste of time. The front-office police person were clearly pretty unhappy with having to deal with this, but escalated to someone who "knew more about these things". The latter applied the investigative method of typing "Portuguese driving licence" into Google Image Search and comparing the results with one of the licences I gave them. After a further escalation to an even more specialised officer, the conclusion was that the documents were indeed fake.

I got a crime reference number and a clear indication that I would never hear from them again, which I indeed haven't.

Still have all the docs (the police didn't want to keep them). They stopped coming after a while.

[123pie123]

another factor is cost - the police do not have enough resourses to investigate

a few weeks ago my car was hit and the driver just drove off without stopping to give details (hit and run) the incident was caught on my dashcam inc car reg plate and faces.

After informing the police on 101 - they said sorry they do not investigate hit and run anymore unless a serious injury has occured - no resources available