Combatting financial crime: City of London Police Partnership extended

Protecting our customers from fraud and stopping money getting into the hands of criminals is a priority for us, so we’ve extended our partnership with the City of London Police (CoLP) into a fourth year to combine our strengths and capability to help make the UK a safer place for our customers and communities.  

Fraud is the biggest crime in the UK and continues to rise, with over £750m lost to fraud in the first six months of 2021, as criminals take advantage of the vulnerable and increased online activities during the pandemic. 

Criminals are constantly finding new ways of tricking people into handing over their money. It’s no longer enough for us as a bank to identify when a payment may be fraudulent or where a customer may be engaged in a scam - it’s vital that we work together across industries, with partners such as the CoLP, to address the root causes and prevent people from falling victim in the first place.

£1.5 million to improve the detection of financial crime

We are very proud of the partnership we’ve built together. Since joining forces in 2018, our relationship has given us a unique opportunity to design and deliver fraud preventative initiatives which have improved the detection of crime, helping the police to catch criminals and protect the public.

Bringing public and private organisations together

We’ve also been able to help CoLP build new relationships with other private sectors to widen their collaborative work on fraud. We’ve introduced them to Cifas, a non-profit fraud prevention association and they are now jointly training Fraud Protect Officers across policing.

We’ve also jointly launched the industry’s first innovative pilot scheme using £7 million captured from fraudsters to fund a series of fraud fighting and victim support programmes across the country. The ‘frozen’ cash has been invested in several projects to tackle fraud. This includes an initiative in partnership with Age UK to help older people increase their knowledge and confidence in recognising and dealing with attempted scams.

Age UK's Scams Prevention and Support Programme

In order to help older people become more aware of potential scams Age UK launched their Scams Prevention and Support Programme, which is one of the initiatives funded with this 'frozen' cash. The programme provides one-to-one and group advice sessions to older people who might be at risk of scams, or who have been victims of scams, so they feel safer and less likely to become repeat victims. Sessions are delivered in a wide range of settings where attendees might be vulnerable to scams, including care homes, religious groups and community centres, health groups, charities, and bereavement groups.

The sessions provide in-depth information and advice for the individual, and may lead to referrals to other services. The programme also delivers awareness-raising talks to provide general information on how to spot and avoid different types of scams, and how to take action against suspected scams.

Sessions are tailored to alert older people about any scams that might be going on in their particular region, as well as the different approaches scammers might be using. These range from doorstep and romance scams to more current methods like Energy Support Scheme text message scams.

Knowledge is power - It takes a network to fight a criminal network

We’ve enjoyed some great success from our City of London Police partnership but equally recognise there is still much more we can do to protect our communities. 

There is a need to share more intelligence and data across public/ private organisations and the term ‘knowledge is power’ has never been so true for fraud prevention. 

There’s real appetite from our industry partners for this and trials have already shown the benefit of data sharing across different sectors in preventing fraud. Our aim is to demonstrate the value in sharing more information across the whole customer payment journey, so each sector and organisation know their vulnerabilities and can be involved in the fraud prevention process.