In an iMoney article from Sarah Davidson about why organized crime goes uninvestigated, Featurespace financial crime prevention expert Alex Robinson says part of the problem has been the way in which fraud is viewed by police: as the responsibility of banks.

“Overall, banks are investing in stopping fraud but banks cannot stop the scams from happening. What they can do is minimise the proportion of successful scam attempts. Nearly 70 per cent of fraud prevented currently, according to UK Finance, and if all banks were using latest machine learning technology this could move up to 80 per cent or 90 per cent. This would reduce the return on investment for scammers, but if they can continue to scale their attacks they will still make millions.”

Professor Mark Button, director of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies at the University of Portsmouth, argues that radical change is required to address the investigative gap through either regionalization or a national solution, through a National Economic Crime Agency.

“Economic crime is the most common type of crime and costs society billions of pounds. In the current policing structures economic crime will always be the Cinderella crime falling behind other policing priorities and lacking the resources required for agencies to effectively tackle it.

Read the full article here: Organised crime is going univestigated as police ‘hide’ behind derided Action Fraud, academic claims