Cyber crime 'could be bigger than drugs trade' warns City of London police chief

 
Cyber attacks: 'Bigger than drugs trade' (Picture: Getty)
Kiran Randhawa14 April 2015
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Cybercrime may now be bigger than the drug trade, the City of London police commissioner has warned.

Adrian Leppard said the problem is so bad police do not have enough resources to tackle it.

Detectives believe that only one in five cybercrimes was reported, and of those only another one in five receive a proper response from law enforcement agencies.

Mr Leppard told a conference organised by techUK, a technology industry body, that cybercriminals were becoming more proficient in stealing and extorting money online.

The scale of the threat is greater than currently thought and the low reporting rates are primarily because banks are happy to write off incidents as costs, he claimed.

The National Fraud Authority estimated in 2013 that the cost of fraud to the UK economy, including cybercrime, was £52 billion. The Office of National Statistics says about seven people are defrauded every minute.

Last November, the treasury select committee was told that banks “substantially understate the true scale” of fraud. The committee heard that cybercriminals were stealing twice the amount from banks that they reported.

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