The impact of fraud is a national security issue

A new report from RUSI explores the impact of fraud on the UK's national security landscape, and sets out the case for adopting a fundamentally different pathway for responding to the problem.

The organisation argues that the response to fraud, which has reached epidemic levels, is far more than financial losses and psychological impact on victims. The response is seen as continuing to fail the individuals, businesses and public bodies which fall victim to it with increasing regularity.

The paper says that, when viewed in the context of the UK’s National Security Objectives – particularly the objectives to ‘protect our people’ and ‘promote our prosperity’  – the limited consideration given to fraud in the national security dialogue seems ‘increasingly perverse’.

Given the wider social and economic damage caused, the case for placing fraud in the national security context should no longer be overlooked. On this basis, this paper makes the case for a new national security approach to tackling fraud, based on a ‘whole of system’ response, including a greater role for the government intelligence architecture, a better resourced and coordinated policing response and increased coordination with the private sector. In reframing this response, understanding fraud’s interplay with more established national security threats, such as serious and organised crime (SOC) and terrorism, is also paramount.

Despite this, RUSI says that there are considerable intelligence gaps surrounding fraud as an organised crime. This is particularly the case with regard to the threat emanating from overseas. This lack of understanding is found to be both a symptom and a cause of the under-representation of fraud in the SOC-specific operational response, particularly in policing – the lack of prioritisation being both symptomatic of the intelligence gaps and a cause of the limited intelligence picture needed to fill the gaps.  

To remedy this, the paper recommends more focused intelligence tasking from the National Security Council, a greater emphasis on fraud within the Strategic Policing Requirement and the breaking down of informational silos to make better use of cross-organisational data-matching tools.

The RUSI paper also explores fraud as a terrorist financing tool and finds ample examples of the ‘repurposing’ of well-established frauds to fulfil the financing needs of a wide range of terrorist actors. In this context, frauds against individuals – including courier fraud, online sales-based fraud and identity fraud – and the private sector echo many of the typologies seen in the organised crime sphere. On this basis, the paper makes the case for mandatory fraud investigation training for counter terrorism investigators as a key alternative disruption tool.