Protecting our customers from fraud

Prevention is the best form of defence against fraud. No one knows this better than the City of London Police, who are amongst the world's leading experts both domestically and internationally, in combating fraud, cyber and economic crime.

The biggest threat to the public now is not only the financial harm that's caused to somebody, but the emotional harm that they suffer as well. A fraudster will put them under pressure, they will rush them to make decisions, or they will find something that feels really relevant to them and have a solution. It’s educating people on how a criminal is making you feel, and it’s the feelings that you need to recognise in the moment and stop, think, get some help and advice.

That's the way in which we're going to protect people.

The landscape of fraud has changed significantly in the past four years. Whether that is through social media, whether it's through Facebook Marketplace, whether it's through auction sites. Our customers are getting duped into making payments to entities such as HMRC or even ourselves as a bank.

A claim that I raised recently was with a business customer, she’s a sole trader. She called us to explain that she had fallen victim to a bailiff scam. They've told her that she needs to hand over the £3,000 or else the bailiffs are going to arrive at her premises and seize her property ultimately. The customer's father had just recently passed away about 2 or 3 months previously. It was quite clear that her grief was still very much present, of course, as it would be. The fraudster said that it was her father that owed the money and that he was due in court on the date that he’d died, unfortunately, yeah.

So, absolutely heart wrenching from the beginning.

At the time of being on the phone and speaking to the fraudster, she was with her family accountant who'd worked closely alongside her father. The accountant actually took over the phone call. The fraudster then proceeded to send the customer some documentation like counterclaim forms, pretending to be the courts, and the accountant signed off on everything. It's such a harrowing example because the customer was obviously vulnerable with the death of her father. The fraudster was so sophisticated, pretending to be a bailiff, and the documentation you talked about, and the accountant has also been duped.

The customer didn't even realise until about a week after. She had sent a letter off to the courts as part of this kind of counterclaim to try and get some money back. And it was the court that had then contacted her to say, look, we believe that you've been scammed. As part of my own investigation as to whether we're going to be able to refund or not, we considered her reasonable basis of belief in regards to the payment that she's trying to make, when the  accountant was taken into play and the sophistication of the fraudster,

And actually the customer did get her money back in the end.There's such a contrast now in that we maybe go back a couple of years ago where fraudsters would have this catch all approach. You know, the phone call will come through, it’ll be the same thing time and time again.

I have an example of £171,000 that a customer nearly lost. And by speaking with that customer on the phone, we were able to save her that money.

Our customers are being specifically targeted., and ultimately, it makes it ten times easier for our customers to be victimised.

The technology is now evolving so that through AI, it's making it easier for criminals to produce  materials, websites, videos in some cases. All of that has made our work much, much more complex. And it's given criminals overseas much broader global markets to target victims.So how do you go about facing off intoa globally connected criminal network? We work in close partnership with the National Crime Agency and with governments overseas and foreign law enforcement. Those sorts of tools that can send out thousands of text messages or thousands of spoof emails, that's the sort of enabling technology that we're now going after in partnership, and that, for me, is ultimately how we will make it much harder for the organised criminals to reach large numbers of victims in the UK.

What are we doing to keep up with the fraudsters?

We use a market-leading fraud engine, it is a machine learned model. We can react really quickly so if we do see something that our frontline colleagues are telling us about, that is literally something that we can have changed in two, three hours. You want to stay a step ahead. You want to make sure that we're protecting customers. Technology plays a part, but I think the education is absolutely key as well, Charlie. I have two young boys and they are now on social media. They want things yesterday and they're very quick.

What more can we do to influence that younger generation? And ensure that tech and telco companies do take some responsibility educating our customers as they're using their tech.

We've been working really hard with Home Office colleagues and with colleagues in the NCA to develop things like the online fraud charter, so that we can help those tech companies understand the role that they can play. And the work that we're doing through the new Action Fraud system will make it easy  for us to share information with them, but they must then act upon that information.

Collaboration from my perspective, is hugely important. We have a relationship with half the adults in the UK.

Some of the insights and the data that your team give us help us protect customers better. The kind of public private  relationship is often narrowly seen through the lens of this is all about just getting money out of business. It's much more than that. We can get access to the technical capabilities that some of those organisations have got, whether that's searching the plethora of databases that are out there to find connections between individuals or using tools to investigate the crypto blockchain and find out where money's gone.

You must have a huge amount of personal resilience to get up every day and do this job?

Every year about 300 people are at such crisis point as a result of the fraud and the harm that's occurred to them, they're at risk of committing suicide. It reminds me why it's so important that with the resourcing we've got, and with the  partnerships we've got, we do everything we can every single day to keep victims safe from fraud.