A specialist police unit funded by the banking and finance industry prevented £31.2 million of fraud and disrupted 23 organised criminal groups in 2019.

The Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU) targets the organised criminal gangs responsible for fraud and is made up of officers from the City of London Police and the Metropolitan Police Service, as well as banking industry fraud investigators and support staff from UK Finance.

Over the past year, the unit has worked in partnership with several social media platforms to identify accounts which featured posts relating to payment crime. Over 1,600 social media accounts linked to fraudulent activity were taken down as a result.

Just under 500 of those were used to recruit young people as ‘money mules’, when someone allows their bank account to be used by criminals to launder the proceeds of fraud, while nearly 250 of the accounts were involved in the trading of stolen card details online.

Over 400 of the accounts removed were so-called brokers, who advertise goods and services at reduced prices that have been bought using stolen card details. The rest of the accounts were used for a range of fraudulent activities including ‘flipping’, where criminals persuade victims to invest money in exchange for a significant return that never materialises.

Overall, 75 fraudsters were convicted last year following investigations by the DCPCU, with a total of 100 years in prison handed out to defendants in fraud cases investigated by the unit. It also seized £1.65 million of assets from criminal gangs – over double the amount confiscated in the same period in 2018.

Detective chief inspector Gary Robinson, the head of the DCPCU, said: “Last year, we stepped up our engagement with social media firms to identify and take down over 1,600 profiles used by fraudsters, and worked closely with mobile phone companies to combat scam techniques such as ‘sim swapping’.

“By working with a wide range of partners and government agencies, we are succeeding in disrupting the activities of organised crime groups and showing them that fraud is not a soft target.”

Katy Worobec, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance, commented: “Criminals are increasingly abusing social media platforms and mobile phone networks to perpetrate fraud, and so it is encouraging that the DCPCU has been strengthening its partnerships with firms in these industries.”

One of the operational successes by the DCPCU in 2019 was the sentencing to nearly seven years in prison of a criminal gang behind a series of frauds and attempted fraud worth over £1.2 million. The case involved a sophisticated organised criminal network that recruited bank staff and then transferred stolen funds through a series of ‘money mule’ accounts.

Meanwhile, two criminals from London who committed almost half a million pounds of fraud received combined prison sentences of over 14 years. They harvested bank details from customers using ‘phishing’ emails or ‘smishing’ text messages, before using ‘sim swaps’ to complete bank transfers and purchases on their accounts. In total, the account details recovered through the operation led to an estimated £27 million of fraud being disrupted and prevented.

Another criminal, who committed over £31,000 of fraud using stolen credit card details, was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, suspended for 18 months, and 120 hours of community work. The criminal used compromised credit cards to make a series of fraudulent transactions, including several purchases of high-value online goods.

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