Page 19LITTLEJOHN RETURNS NEXT WEEK
Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019
T
HE woman on the phone
had a warm and reassuring
manner and quickly won
my confidence.
She was, she said, a BT engineer,
who wanted to make sure my computer
hadn’t been ‘compromised’ by fraudulent
activity after my email account was hacked.
There seemed no reason not to trust her.
She knew my computer’s identification
number after all.
Little did I know, on that fateful day two
years ago, that it was this woman who was
the fraudster, and her duplicitous act — and
my gullibility — would allow her to steal
£18,000 from my bank account.
But as terrible as that was, it was the next
phone conversation that left me truly in
despair — and I know now that it is an expe-
rience all too common with fraud victims.
Like so many scammed out of their hard-
earned savings, once I’d reported the crime,
I was advised by police to call Action Fraud,
the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud
and cybercrime.
This, I assumed, was a team of specialists.
How wrong I was. A newspaper investigation
this week has revealed the people who
operate the Action Fraud call centre are
dismally-trained amateurs. Not only do
many have no policing background, but, as
The Times revealed, some of the staff even
have criminal histories and come to work
‘under the influence’ of drugs and alcohol.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, to
learn they make little effort to take seriously
desperate calls from devastated victims.
Instead of reassuring anxious callers —
many of whom will be elderly and distressed
— some of these callous individuals prefer to
play on their phones and lark about even as
those who have been duped are pouring out
their hearts.
And so those targeted by fraudulent preda-
tors are betrayed twice: first by the heartless
conmen and women who steal their money,
and then by the inept, unqualified, heartless
dunces charged with tracking them down.M
OST people I know would agree
that, on paper, I’m not a typical
victim of fraud. As a professor of
investigative psychology, I’ve spent
my life studying the criminal mind. I’ve
helped police track down the grisliest of
criminals, including notorious serial killer
rapists John Duffy and David Mulcahy in the
1980s. Recently, I’ve dedicated my
time to studying complex cases of
financial crime.
And yet I still fell foul of a care-
fully orchestrated scam. I first
knew something was amiss when
distant acquaintances started
contacting me to check if I was
stranded on holiday in Turkey and
required funds to get home.
When I checked my email
account, I discovered it had been
hacked and my contacts had been
peppered with emails, supposedly
sent by me, advising them of my
plight and the need for cash. The
fraudsters were redirecting
responses to their own account.
Fortunately, none of the recipi-
ents — most of whom I hadn’t
contacted in years — sent money
to the fake email, knowing it was
highly unlikely I would email out
of the blue in such a manner.
That, I thought was the end of it
— but it transpired that I’d been
softened up by a subtle piece of
social engineering.
A few days later I received a call
from a ‘BT engineer’. I was very
busy with work at the time and
was wary of using my computer
after the hacking incident. I
wanted the problem solved as
quickly as possible and this nice
woman on the phone who seemed
to know all about what had
happened was there to help.
That was a disastrous mistake
on my part. She was very polite,
complimenting me on my comput-
ing skills, as she took control of
my computer and said they were
sorting out the problem. It wasonly when she told me not to use
my phone for a day or two that I
started to think something
was amiss.
So I consulted an IT expert who
helps me at work, and it was then
that I discovered that the crimi-
nals had, via my computer, hacked
into my online bank account and
transferred a total of £18,000 to
various accounts of their own.
This was only an hour or so after
the phone call, but my bank
refused to cancel the transfer.
(Eventually, after I really started
to kick up a fuss, they returned
the money.)
Like any victim of a crime, I
immediately contacted the police,
who gave me a crime report
number and told me to contact
Action Fraud.
To say that they were useless is a
wild understatement.
After failing to get through to
them on the phone, I contactedthem through their website, and
tried to fill in an online form that
was totally inadequate. There was
hardly any space to describe what
had happened.
And when I tried to enter the
bank details of the criminals (that
I’d obtained from my bank), I was
instructed not to include them.
How on earth were they going to
track down my money?
Eventually, I managed to speak
to someone at Action Fraud over
the phone. I was so relieved that I
didn’t hold back and embarked on
a detailed blow-by-blow account.
But the guy on the other end of
the line simply wasn’t interested.
It was clear that he was just going
through the motions.
Since I shared my story I’ve had
lots of people contact me to tell
me of similar experiences. Doctors,
lawyers, established business peo-
ple; all have lost substantial
amounts of money.
Last year, £1.2 billion was stolen
through fraud and scams. It’s an
eye-watering amount,
Yet through my work, I’ve spoken
to countless officers working in
economic crime who are honest
about the fact that they only focus
on cases where losses run into
hundreds of thousands of pounds.
This ignores the fact that when a
small business loses even £10,000,
it can mean bankruptcy. I’velearned that the consequences
can be tragically far reaching.
Some victims are so distressed by
their predicament and embar-
rassed by being duped, that they
blame themselves for their naivety
and commit suicide.
It is surely the duty of organisa-
tions like Action Fraud to ensure
a victim’s despair never reaches
that point. The least we should be
able to expect is that the dedi-
cated national taskforce is staffed
by experienced professionals who
take a victim’s claims seriously.B
UT to treat those who suf-
fer these crimes as morons
or pretend to be police
officers when they are not
— both of which the undercover
Times journalist reported — is a
disgrace that only compounds the
victims’ despair.
More often than not, scammers
don’t fit the stereotype of bully
boys grabbing handbags on the
street. They are teams of
subtle manipulators who, as I
discovered, manage to find vic-
tims when they are most vulnera-
ble; perhaps going through a
divorce, moving home, coming to
terms with a recent diagnosis of a
serious illness — or just busy and
pre-occupied as I was that day.These are the very people Action
Fraud should be treating with
most care.
So what should be done? Sack-
ing a few careless individuals who
have been caught slacking won’t
solve anything in the long term.
Instead, we need to revolutionise
the way fraud is investigated.
Integrating a specialist police
organisation with the banking
industry would be a start. After
all, from the moment someone is
scammed, every minute is
precious. Anything that enables
cooperation between the two
sectors should be welcomed.
City of London Police Com-
mander Karen Baxter, the national
lead for economic crime, yester-
day told the Mail: ‘We are horrified
and saddened to hear reports that
victims — vulnerable and
otherwise — are treated disre-
spectfully when they report to
Action Fraud.
‘We are working to ensure these
dreadful attitudes to victim care
have no place in service delivery
and I would like to apologise to
any victim who is concerned by
how their crime report was man-
aged by call centre staff.’
In the meantime, fraudsters
must be licking their lips at the
current state of ineptitude. Hell,
they’re probably laughing at
Action Fraud all the way to their
overseas bank.
n DAVID CANTER is an
Emeritus Professor at the
University of Liverpool.by Professor
David Canter
CONNED... AND
CONNED AGAIN
When top criminologist
DAVID CANTER lost
£18,000 to a phone
scammer, he hoped
the Action Fraud
helpline would
bring him justice.
In fact, he says, their
hollow promises were
a shattering betrayal
STOP THE
BANK
SCAMMERS