The Metropolitan Police is setting up an e-crime co-ordination unit to bring together all agencies that deal with internet crime.
The unit will be a partnership between government, business and the police, and will be operational by the end of the year. It may be extended to a national level if it is successful.
Commander Sue Wilkinson of New Scotland Yard says the unit will serve a number of purposes.
‘This will provide a centre of excellence for all agencies that deal with e-crime, where they can share best practice policy, co-ordinate major investigations, and provide a national point of contact for people wishing to report e-crime,’ she said.
‘The biggest challenge is mainstreaming e-crime. It’s everywhere. If every e-crime was reported our polices forces would be swamped. Half the challenge is that most of the time there is no blood on the walls. If there was it would be easier to galvanise people.’
Wilkinson says that most e-crime goes unreported because of a lack of contact points. The Metropolitan Police runs the only national point of contact for fraud and phishing reports, at www.met.police.uk/fraudalert.
Many people do not know that they can report e-crimes to local forces, but incidents that are reported are often not dealt with properly as local police forces do not always have the necessary resources to be able to deal with them, says Wilkinson.
Level-two crimes, such as online fraud, were previously dealt with by the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), which became part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in April this year. But Soca now only deals with level-three, or top-level crime.
Peter Sommer, senior research fellow at London School of Economics, says the new unit will fill the space left by the NHTCU, but fears that it will do little more.
‘The problem is that the NHTCU had specific funding, which is no longer available. The Met’s computer crime unit is going to have to fight for law enforcement funding from the Home Office at the time when the priorities are anti-terrorism and anti-social behaviour. In the late 1990s computer crime was more of a priority,’ he said.
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