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Identity theft amounts to a collective mugging of the British public on a grand scale. We should do more to stamp it out
In the last few months I have changed my first name to Liam, taken a decade off my age, become single and acquired a cross-breed dog called Lamy. Or so the post tells me. Every few days a letter comes through the door addressed to a mystery companion whom business databases think lives at my house, ordering products for which no one pays. The latest, from Marks & Spencer Money, requests payment for pet insurance on an animal I don't own (male, a year old, and worth £600 in compensation if reported lost). Lamy, please go home: you're not mine.
Someone has constructed the electronic profile of a plausible but fictitious Mr Liam Glover at my address. Once established, the creator could have set about making money from the character – though I can't tell whether in my case anyone did. The trickery is ingenious. A drip, drip of oddities has never seemed to amount to a crime: and yet the sum total of the consequences can be criminal. No single act has caused enough bother for anyone to stop it, but added together the sums obtained are worth having.
There's a false bank account, somewhere. One morning my phone line went dead, then restarted, with a fresh number, under my poltergeist's name (BT have since proved reluctant to deal with anyone other than the nonexistent Liam, whom they seem happy to have as a customer and still ring to tempt with special offers). The AA expected a payment for a car I do not drive. Esquire magazine began to arrive through the door – and there was much more like this.
Such small things were tedious but – to me – not damaging. That's the trick of identity fraud: a route into a crime for which the immediate victim does not always have to pay and which is all but invisible until you spot its bewildering traces. "I get about 15 of these a week," said the cheerful woman on the M&S phone line when I rang to report the false insurance policy. She asked me to send the letters back marked "addressee unknown", which is hardly the same as calling 999 with looters outside.
Yet the scale of commercial looting which results from identity theft (in itself not illegal) is much greater than the sum of the goods stolen in last month's violence. Fraud costs Britain more than £30bn a year, the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau estimates, as much as the defence budget. Of that, identity fraud is a steady and sizeable part – £2.7bn, affecting some 1.8 million people last year – and yet in the absence of smashed glass and burned shops, there is less fuss. As a nation, we obsess about crimes of violence. We demand instant jail terms for the teenage looter who steals trainers, but overlook the subtler criminal who clones credit cards. "Fraud has not been on the priority list for all forces," a NFIB official tells me. "The law enforcement world is aware of the gaps."
Indeed, on its list of frequent questions the same agency even asks, "is it a really good idea to start counting all this fraud?". True, the crimes are fragmented, the cost spread over many businesses and the scale hard to measure. One industry organisation reports 51,796 cases of identity fraud in the first six months of this year, up 11% – but more striking than the fluctuating total is the speed with which criminality evolves. Fraud against savings accounts doubled this year; there was a two-thirds increase in action against mobile phone companies. Why, after all, burgle a phone shop and risk getting caught when it's easy enough to steal a name and get the firm to send a smartphone in the post?
It's unfair to suggest the police don't care. There is an new national police unit, a pair of recently established government agencies and a central helpline to report fraud – collating data and tracking patterns. But no one seems very sure of how many prosecutions result, or how many people fall victim, do not notice or (like me) take months to report their suspicions.
For centuries the British propertied classes have been chasing poachers off their land and burglers from their houses. Indirect crime, like online shopping or banking, is treated as less of a bother than the blood and tears humanity of direct personal contact. Get mugged in the street and it hurts. Find you have signed up to insurance for a fake dog, and the crime is more comic than troubling.
I suppose "Liam Glover" planned a pet insurance claim on Lamy's reported loss. If settled, the claim would have cost me nothing, and been spread, theoretically, over innumerable pet insurance customers through negligible increases in their premiums. If Liam pulls off a fraud on credit cards, the banks will pay. BT are paying for the fraudulent phone line.
So why should I get aerated, or bother with trying to persuade the police that an officer should be tasked with pulling these threads together? And why should the police give this the priority that violent crime, whose statistics reliably inflame politics and the media, can grab? Yet, petty fraud by petty fraud, the total adds up to a collective mugging of the public on a grand scale. Here is a theft for which no police sirens sound, no blue lights flash. Perhaps they should.
Julian Glover
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Identity theft amounts to a collective mugging of the British public on a grand scale. We should do more to stamp it out
In the last few months I have changed my first name to Liam, taken a decade off my age, become single and acquired a cross-breed dog called Lamy. Or so the post tells me. Every few days a letter comes through the door addressed to a mystery companion whom business databases think lives at my house, ordering products for which no one pays. The latest, from Marks & Spencer Money, requests payment for pet insurance on an animal I don't own (male, a year old, and worth £600 in compensation if reported lost). Lamy, please go home: you're not mine.
Someone has constructed the electronic profile of a plausible but fictitious Mr Liam Glover at my address. Once established, the creator could have set about making money from the character – though I can't tell whether in my case anyone did. The trickery is ingenious. A drip, drip of oddities has never seemed to amount to a crime: and yet the sum total of the consequences can be criminal. No single act has caused enough bother for anyone to stop it, but added together the sums obtained are worth having.
There's a false bank account, somewhere. One morning my phone line went dead, then restarted, with a fresh number, under my poltergeist's name (BT have since proved reluctant to deal with anyone other than the nonexistent Liam, whom they seem happy to have as a customer and still ring to tempt with special offers). The AA expected a payment for a car I do not drive. Esquire magazine began to arrive through the door – and there was much more like this.
Such small things were tedious but – to me – not damaging. That's the trick of identity fraud: a route into a crime for which the immediate victim does not always have to pay and which is all but invisible until you spot its bewildering traces. "I get about 15 of these a week," said the cheerful woman on the M&S phone line when I rang to report the false insurance policy. She asked me to send the letters back marked "addressee unknown", which is hardly the same as calling 999 with looters outside.
Yet the scale of commercial looting which results from identity theft (in itself not illegal) is much greater than the sum of the goods stolen in last month's violence. Fraud costs Britain more than £30bn a year, the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau estimates, as much as the defence budget. Of that, identity fraud is a steady and sizeable part – £2.7bn, affecting some 1.8 million people last year – and yet in the absence of smashed glass and burned shops, there is less fuss. As a nation, we obsess about crimes of violence. We demand instant jail terms for the teenage looter who steals trainers, but overlook the subtler criminal who clones credit cards. "Fraud has not been on the priority list for all forces," a NFIB official tells me. "The law enforcement world is aware of the gaps."
Indeed, on its list of frequent questions the same agency even asks, "is it a really good idea to start counting all this fraud?". True, the crimes are fragmented, the cost spread over many businesses and the scale hard to measure. One industry organisation reports 51,796 cases of identity fraud in the first six months of this year, up 11% – but more striking than the fluctuating total is the speed with which criminality evolves. Fraud against savings accounts doubled this year; there was a two-thirds increase in action against mobile phone companies. Why, after all, burgle a phone shop and risk getting caught when it's easy enough to steal a name and get the firm to send a smartphone in the post?
It's unfair to suggest the police don't care. There is an new national police unit, a pair of recently established government agencies and a central helpline to report fraud – collating data and tracking patterns. But no one seems very sure of how many prosecutions result, or how many people fall victim, do not notice or (like me) take months to report their suspicions.
For centuries the British propertied classes have been chasing poachers off their land and burglers from their houses. Indirect crime, like online shopping or banking, is treated as less of a bother than the blood and tears humanity of direct personal contact. Get mugged in the street and it hurts. Find you have signed up to insurance for a fake dog, and the crime is more comic than troubling.
I suppose "Liam Glover" planned a pet insurance claim on Lamy's reported loss. If settled, the claim would have cost me nothing, and been spread, theoretically, over innumerable pet insurance customers through negligible increases in their premiums. If Liam pulls off a fraud on credit cards, the banks will pay. BT are paying for the fraudulent phone line.
So why should I get aerated, or bother with trying to persuade the police that an officer should be tasked with pulling these threads together? And why should the police give this the priority that violent crime, whose statistics reliably inflame politics and the media, can grab? Yet, petty fraud by petty fraud, the total adds up to a collective mugging of the public on a grand scale. Here is a theft for which no police sirens sound, no blue lights flash. Perhaps they should.
Julian Glover
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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