A press release by Stop Scams UK promises the introduction of pilot projects to share fraud intelligence between some of the country’s biggest companies.
The first wave sees, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, NatWest, Match Group, Meta, Monzo, Santander, and Three all sign a joint statement to further support Stop Scams UK’s intelligence sharing pilots. All Stop Scams UK members are welcome to join.
The statement pledges them to work together. This involves building upon previous pilots, though no details about these pilots were provided. Per Ruth Evans, Chair of Stop Scams UK (pictured):
Through our pilot work to share fraud data between industry sectors, we have proved that collaboration gets ahead of the criminals and defeats fraudsters.
One difficulty with assessing this statement is that previous pilots may have satisfied Ruth Evans, but there is scant information in the public domain to support her assertions. There will inevitably be a rush of people who will laud the supposed success of a written pledge being signed by numerous executives, but the proof is in the pudding, not in the pledge to make a pudding. What an executive says need not be the same as what an executive does. The pledge signed by the representatives was light on specifics and heavy on vacuous marketing-speak. For example:
- “2025 presents a unique opportunity for collaboration” — why was 2024 not a good time to fight fraud, and how will 2026 be any different?
- “We look forward to working with the Government and law enforcement to drive progress and make the UK the most inhospitable place in the world for fraudsters” — the goal is clear, but what makes anybody believe Britain’s public sector will have the resources needed to act upon any additional fraud intelligence it receives?
- “Now marks the moment to accelerate, build and scale” — but now is not the moment to be specific in detailing what this work involves, who is paying for it or how much they have committed to spend.
The problem with announcements that are 99% inspirational and 1% factual is that criminals are caught and punished through the collection of factual information about their crimes, not by everybody making vague promises about ‘redoubling their efforts’. Does making double the effort mean that all these firms previously did half as much as they needed to? Will the budgets they allocate for scam prevention be literally doubled? Are they going to employ twice as many fraud managers and analysts as before?
I have spent too long monitoring publicly available data about fraud to be impressed by words. A pledge is a series of words. If it results in action then those actions should be praised. That is why I will reserve praise, irrespective of how many others will jump on the congratulatory bandwagon. Stop Scams UK may be reluctant to discuss the processes by which information will be shared because they fear that would tip off fraudsters. However, organized criminals have the wherewithal to bribe insiders and steal information. This begs serious questions about how secret any anti-fraud program can be once it gains scale and starts employing more than a few staff. If intelligence sharing was meant to be a complete secret then nobody would share a press release about it.
There is a syndrome in any protective function like fraud prevention where leaders will try to continuously have their cake and eat it. They will want to assert that the current level of fraud is very high, and this announcement by Stop Scams UK made much of that. They will simultaneously want to assert that their efforts have succeeded in reducing fraud. There is an inevitable tension between these messages. Stop Scams UK was incorporated on March 9, 2020. It is young enough to be absolved of any blame if fraud has risen since then. They are also young enough to not be responsible for the unreliable measures used to measure the scale of fraud in the UK. If better measures are not prioritized then there is the risk that all work done to tackle fraud is treated as effective even when it represented a poor way to allocate limited resources.
Organizations like Stop Scams UK need to prioritize robust measures of crime and robust measures of the impact that their activities have upon crime. Sharing more data can help with achieving that objective, but is not sufficient to achieve it. Prioritizing the accurate and complete measurement of fraud would be a major departure from the business practices of many of the companies that signed this pledge.
One of the most pertinent measures for the UK would be to look at how well the legal system brings fraudsters to justice. Professor Nic Ryder of Cardiff University has observed that both the number of fraud prosecutions and the conviction rate for the Serious Fraud Office have fallen significantly. The punishments given are also modest when compared to the maximum sentence for fraud in the USA. These figures make me skeptical about other measures that claim fraud losses started falling towards the end of the previous government. The Conservative Party tried to position fraud prevention as a cheap way to win votes without being specific about the government action they had taken to attain this goal. The reported fall in fraud is too politically convenient an outcome not to be wary of the potential for bias.
Perhaps this new pledge represents a genuine turning point in the fight against fraud in the UK. We can only know that in future, and if robust measures of fraud reveal a downward trend. Sharing data is a good idea in principle. More data needs to be shared with the public before we can be sure it has been successful in practice.
The press release from Stop Scams UK can be found here.
