Inside Report Fraud

Now, whilst there's no Alex and no Liz, I'm ably assisted by Professor Mark Button.

He's the professor of criminology at

Portsmouth University.

Hello.

Nice to be here.

Mark, thanks so much for joining us on Scam Secrets.

I'm really glad to have you with us because I know that you've got a special interest in the way we report fraud attacks in this country, haven't you?

I have, yes.

I've done lots of studies over the years into victims of fraud, and that's included how they report or how they often struggle to report fraud to the authorities.

Now, you did a lot of research into Report Fraud's predecessor, Action Fraud, back in 2021.

What was the problem with Action Fraud?

Well, there were lots of problems.

So, first of all, lots of victims found it difficult to report.

They couldn't find the telephone number, or if they did find the telephone number, they couldn't get through.

If they had to report online, they struggled.

Then if they did manage to report, there was a problem with lots of victims actually not receiving any information back from action fraud.

So they didn't know whether their case had actually been dealt with.

And a whole series of issues underpinning action fraud.

So particularly their IT system, which made it very difficult to link cases together for different police forces to utilise that for the purposes of more complex investigations.

So you kind of add all those ingredients together.

And not surprisingly, it got a bad image.

It had a very bad brand reputation.

So I should say, Mark, when I said in the introduction that it's the UK's fraud reporting centre, it does describe itself as that, the UK home for fraud reporting.

Actually, Scotland isn't part of this.

And if you go on the website, and it's open in front of me now, it says, tell us what happened and we'll help you to report it to the police.