London toughens up on fraud

The London Fraud Forum, a collective of public and private sector organisations, will focus on sharing best practice on prevention, education and detection to make London a harder target for fraudsters.

London is the economic centre of the UK and 70% of all UK fraud, conservatively estimated at £20bn in losses, is committed in the London area. The Forum will use the expertise of international corporations and law enforcement partners to support medium to small level businesses to improve their fraud prevention.

The Forum will be made up of representatives from academic, legal, industry, business, public sector, police organisations and is the largest partnership project that has been embarked on to tackle a single type of crime.

Regional Fraud Forums began two years ago with the North East area establishing the concept and setting up the first one. London’s Fraud Forum will compliment the regional network that is being set up to cover the rest of the country.

The nature of fraud means that it is more effective to prevent it occurring than to purely rely on law enforcement. The Forum will unify a wide variety of organisations to confront and tackle the problem.

The first major project for the Forum is hosting a conference on October 4 at the Barbican aimed at bringing together London’s bigger businesses to become involved in the Forum’s work. Following on from that a series of educational workshops are planned for small to medium sized businesses to provide practical prevention and enforcement advice.

Alan Day, chair of the London Fraud Forum, said: “The launch of the London Fraud Forum is a significant step forward in making London a harder target for fraudsters. The Forum will enable smaller organisations that have traditionally had less sophisticated fraud prevention to access expertise on fraud issues. This will help protect them from losses that could cause major harm to their business and have a real impact in staying a step ahead of the criminals.”