Thu, 20 Dec 2012
Fraud is expected to increase dramatically across the UK and the rest of Europe in 2013 as a result of economic conditions, reduced UK spend on benefits and the availability of more high quality data, a UK fraud consultancy has said.

Such factors mean that fraud prevention at UK businesses will be dominated by 10 key trends in 2013, predicts UK Fraud. They include:

• Fraud hotspots most likely to be affected in 2013 include: banks and card companies, insurers, online merchants, retailers and government including Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the new universal credit scheme for state benefits, and local authorities.
• The types of fraud most likely to see the biggest growth will be Card Not Present (CNP) card fraud, various varieties of cybercrime, internal fraud and, with special interest to recruitment businesses, supply chain fraud. Procurement fraud is also set to rise significantly, about which a UK Fraud spokesperson says: “In contracting economies, evidence suggests that people inside this function can be put under pressure to defraud.”

• Mortgage fraud is set to surge, with rises in first-party fraud, where people misrepresent their finances whilst applying for mortgages.
• Recent spectacular mass data breaches and suspicion of cloud security in some areas will continue.
• Solutions for data breaches will move to “better and newer generations of screening, scoring and risk-based monitoring”, UK Fraud says.
• UK Fraud suggests there is “a lack of unified central direction and strategy from government” to deal with fraud issues, identifying three different government organisations that are tasked with dealing with various fraud and cybercrime issues. There is also, the consultancy says, a lack of “a pan-European strategy” in dealing with fraud issues. “Some believe passionately that the lack of a unified central government strategy will drive up fraud significantly in 2013,” UK Fraud says. Changes in the presence, position and fraud service offerings of one or more of the major data bureaux will undergo “a major shift”. This will result from more solutions either moving either to in-house or to systems developed by new players.
• And there is always the possibility of high-profile “surprises” such as previous scandals in expense fiddling, banking and bribes.

• See www.ukfraud.com for the full list of potential fraud trends.