Page ^ Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019
Criminals ‘answer
fraud helpline calls’
MPs last night demanded an
urgent inquiry into why Brit-
ain’s official fraud reporting
hotline was outsourced to a
controversial US firm.
Concentrix, a private com-
pany, was recruited by City of
London Police to run its Action
Fraud helpline in August 2015
despite its reputation for
aggressive practices.
The firm had been hired by
HM Revenue and Customs in
201 to root out tax credit fraudand complaints were already
flooding in. In September 2016
the taxman cancelled the con-
tract, worth up to £75million,
following reports of a ‘guilty
until proven innocent’
approach to claimants.
It emerged that tens of thou-
sands of people were sent
threatening letters and unfairly
stripped of their benefits. In
one case a claimant was
accused of living with Joseph
Rowntree, a philanthropist whodied in 1925, while another was
told she was cohabiting with RS
McColl, a chain of newsagents.
Yesterday Frank Field, chair-
man of the Commons work and
pensions committee, said he
was ‘speechless’ over the deci-
sion to appoint Concentrix to
run the Action Fraud call cen-
tre and demanded an inquiry.
He said: ‘Who are these sup-
posed grown-ups making these
decisions? It really is a case of
the blind leading the blind.’By Jim Norton
is said to have joked that at some
point ‘there won’t be anyone else
to recruit in this town’. She alleg-
edly said: ‘For criminal convictions
there’s not a lot that would stop
you getting the role. What I’ve
found from experience is just to
declare everything up front.
‘We had somebody who worked
here, a really good worker as well,
some young girl. She then took
the information she learnt here to
go out and defraud other people.’
Mr Rodgers said the youngwoman was hired after failing to
disclose a criminal conviction but
was fired after a police vetting
team found out. He said that shewhy is she sitting in there? You do
realise who she is, don’t you?’
City of London Police told The
Times that staff were vetted to
standards set by the College of
Policing. A spokesman pledged to
‘take immediate action should
anyone be found to have lied on
their vetting forms or committed
an offence whilst working for us’.
He added: ‘This can include dis-
missal in the most serious cases.’
The force has asked Concentrix
to investigate reports of staffbeing drunk at work, taking rec-
reational drugs and abusing pre-
scription pain medication.
Concentrix has suspended four
staff members. Its spokesman
said it has ‘strict hiring guidelines’
and that staff vetting is performed
by the police.
It said it has a ‘zero-tolerance
stance on drugs and alcohol’ and
‘any attempted act of fraud or
deception will not be tolerated’.
Conned... and conned
again – Page 19...and one
even used
her job to
pick up tips
on being a
conwoman!
A FRAUD reporting centre
hires staff with criminal records
to take calls from victims of
scams and cyber crime, it has
been alleged.
Convicts can reportedly be
employed by Action Fraud, through
outsourcing company Concentrix,
to take crime reports as long as
their past offences do not make
them ‘high risk’ and they were hon-
est in their applications.
But in one case, a female call handler
with a criminal past is said to have
used the tactics she learnt during her
training at the Scottish call centre to
later try to commit fraud.
It follows revelations that call han-
dlers were trained to mislead their vic-
tims into thinking their cases would be
investigated – when most were never
looked at again.
Although most crimes are reported
to local police forces, fraud victims are
told to log their cases with Action
Fraud, a national service.
City of London Police oversee this,
but the running of the Action Fraud
call centre has been outsourced to
Concentrix, a US company.
The leniency on criminal pasts was
exposed by an undercover reporter at
The Times while being trained at the
call centre, which is on a Concen-
trix site in Gourock, a town west
of Glasgow.
Michael Rodgers, the City of
London police training manager,
reportedly told staff: ‘There are
some people that have got convic-
tions and they’re in there because
they were honest about it.’
When questioned on what sort of
crimes they may have committed,
he replied they were ‘like driving
offences, breach of the peace, all
that kind of stuff ’.
With turnover of staff very high,
Frankie Cully, the company’s in-
house recruiter for Action Fraud,
Why was ‘aggressive’ US firm hired?
‘Staff trained to
mislead victims’is now under investigation on sus-
picion of committing fraud. He
added: ‘[A colleague] actually re-
interviewed her. She was waiting
to be interviewed and I was like,