Shadow home secretary will say Labour would set up a FraudWatch body to help block online scam sites
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is to pledge tough action against internet shopping fraud and other new forms of digital crime. Identifying online as the fastest-growing area of rising crime, she is expected to say on Wednesday that the police do not have the skills, equipment or structures to cope with the problem.
The shadow home secretary is to commit a future Labour government to the creation of a specific new criminal offence of identity fraud.
She will also commit to setting up a new industry-backed body, FraudWatch, to counter fraudsters online, and a "Police First" programme, along the lines of Teach First, to attract the brightest technology graduates into policing for a few years.
In her Labour conference speech, Cooper will also spell out plans to create a commissioner for domestic and sexual violence to drive improvements across the criminal justice system.
The commissioner would be based on the successful model of the children's commissioner, who has a duty to champion the interests of children and has played a key role in ending the detention of children in immigration centres.
Cooper is to tell the Labour conference that online crime is rising exponentially as organised crime gangs and networks move from the street to the internet.
"We live our lives online now‚ but criminals know that too," she will say. "It's a big risk for business – online trade should be a big area for economic growth. And it's a big cost for all of us. When the credit card companies and banks write off so much fraud we all lose out by higher charges."
She is expected to say that it is time that home secretary Theresa May and the government move into the 21st century and do something about it. Cooper says much online crime is not being captured by official crime statistics but they are a key growth area for the police.
She says Adrian Leppard, the City of London police chief, has said that 1,300 organised crime gangs have been identified by the national fraud intelligence bureau. They operate out of 25 different countries but predominantly target the UK.
The official retail crime survey put the total cost of online crime for the retail sector alone at £205m in 2011/12.
The online security company Norton has estimated that 12.5 million people in Britain have been a victim of cybercrime in the past 12 months. A Which? survey found most were victims of online shopping scams and put the average amount lost at £1,500. Cooper says that the House of Commons library has established there is no specific criminal offence of identity theft on the statute book.
The term "identity theft" includes a person's name and other personal information or financial details being stolen. But no offence is committed until it is used to commit fraud.
The shadow home secretary says the lack of a specific criminal offence of identity theft leads to confusion about how to arrest or charge people with an offence, particularly if the crime involved a number of different people. While there are several other relevant criminal offences, such as obtaining services dishonestly, none apply specifically to stealing somebody's identity online.
FraudWatch is intended as a body similar to the Internet Watch Foundation, which operates a hotline for the public to report child sex abuse online so the industry can block access. Peter Neyroud, a former Thames Valley chief constable who is on the IWF board, has been asked by Labour to work with industry to develop a similar approach to blocking websites involved in scams.
No comments:
Post a Comment