Diplomats ‘need to get their hands dirty and deal with foreign fraudsters’

Britain’s diplomats need to “get their hands dirty” by joining the fight against organised crime and persuading foreign governments to take action against fraudsters overseas targeting the public here, a leading think-tank said today.

The Royal United Services Institute said that lobbying was needed because a significant proportion of crime was being perpetrated by offenders in “fraud factories and call centres” abroad.

It said that Britain’s spies should also play a key role in tackling “the UK’s endemic fraud problem” by using cyber defence to block fraudsters operating online. The call follows the publication of the integrated review of the security challenges facing the country. It included financial crime as a foreign policy concern and pledged to “bolster our response to the more pressing threats the UK faces from organised crime, illicit finance and fraud”.

Helena Wood, from the Royal United Services Institute, said the recognition of the dangers caused by fraud was a “step change” in the official response, but warned that it would need action from diplomats if concrete results were to be achieved.

“We have to get diplomats pulling their weight because a lot of the threat is coming from overseas,” she said. “We have to set out where the international threat is because they really don’t know where that’s coming from, so you scope that out and get GCHQ involved. Then I’d like to see some diplomats getting their hands a bit dirty and doing some work because they don’t like to get involved in the nasty business of organised crime.

“With many fraud perpetrators targeting the UK from outside it is important that the Government looks to a response which goes beyond the criminal justice system. We need diplomats to raise the pressure on nations hosting fraud factories and call centres.”

Ms Wood said such an approach was necessary because the alternative of trying to mount prosecutions against offenders based overseas was impractical. But she added that it would also be necessary to give hundreds of millions more to police forces to tackle fraudsters because work against fraud was currently “woefully under-funded” to restore public confidence in law enforcement. “People are starting to lose faith in the rule of the law because fraud is the crime they’re most likely to experience and they’re not getting a response to it,” she warned.

“Without a major systemic shift in the Government’s strategic approach to tackling fraud, the issue will continue to fester unchecked.”

Ms Wood’s warning follows an admission by Ben Russell, the deputy head of the National Crime Agency’s National Economic Crime Centre, that “focused predators” in crime groups are stealing “huge amounts of money” from the public because of the extent of fraud in crimes of “real nastiness”.

Mr Russell said romance fraud, under which people are duped into parting with large sums in the belief they are in a relationship with someone online, was one of the most traumatic and that “there has always historically been a link with west Africa which continues.”

He added that law enforcers did “a lot of work with the authorities there and do everything we can to repatriate funds to victims” but conceded that more action was needed.