Question: would you cheerfully walk down the street of a strange city on a Friday night with £10,000 or £15,000 in cash in your pocket? Of course you wouldn’t. Well, actually you would, because you do more or less the same thing every time you go abroad on holiday. Most of us have in our wallets a few credit and debit cards, which between them probably have a total credit limit of anything up to 15 grand. For us, our bank cards are just “plastic”. But for some people, they represent real money.
One such person observed a sailor who went into a bar in Barcelona a while back and spent €30 on drinks. He paid with a card and left. Shortly after that, 10 separate transactions for €3,300 each were made using his card. It took the sailor quite a while (and the assistance of a security expert) to persuade his bank that he was not responsible for the €33,000 bill.
Now I know that there are lies, damned lies and crime statistics, but everyone in the UK, including the Office for National Statistics, seems to agree that recorded crime is decreasing – and has been for quite a while. This is one of the arguments the government is using to justify its savage cuts in police budgets. Given that we’ve got crime on the run (so the argument goes) all we have to do now is to get the coppers to become more efficient – working smarter, making better use of information technology and computers, etc. Reduction in crime means we don’t need so many police officers. QED.
The only fly in this rosy ointment is that it’s based on a false premise. Recorded crime is declining, but that’s largely due to the fact that crime has moved on – specifically from the physical world to cyberspace. And there’s a very simple reason for this: cybercrime is a much safer and more lucrative activity than its real-world counterpart. The rewards are much greater, and the risks of being caught and convicted are vanishingly small. So if you’re a rational criminal with a reasonable IQ, why would you bother mugging people, breaking into houses, nicking cars and doing all the other things that old-style crooks do – and that old-style cops are good at catching them doing?
Over the past few months, I’ve had sobering conversations with some senior and mid-ranking police officers, every one of whom believes that cybercrime has been at alarming levels for some time and none of whom seems confident that our law enforcement system can deal with it. These views are corroborated by the experiences of the 5% of UK internet users who have been the victims of various kinds of cybercrime – identity theft, phishing scams, card fraud, malware attacks and the like; they report a variety of responses – almost none of them helpful – from the local police forces to whom they turn for help.
At the local level, there are good and bad reasons for the apparently tepid response of UK police forces to this new plague. One good reason is that the perpetrators are often hard to identify, and even when they can be identified they turn out to be operating in jurisdictions (eg the Russian Federation) from which they cannot be extracted. Other reasons include bureaucratic inertia, lack of technical knowledge and a shortage of resources, which means that cybercrime receives lower priority than other, more urgent, responsibilities. Or simply the fact that officers can’t be bothered to do anything other than go through the motions.
The only thing that everyone I’ve spoken to agrees on is that the level of cybercrime is vast and growing. Professor Ross Anderson and his colleagues at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory have had a good go at estimating it, but even they think that it’s exceedingly difficult to measure accurately, for a variety of reasons – the spectrum of wrongdoing that it encompasses, the fact that much of it is under-reported and widely distributed, and that the true cost includes not only the actual damage done, but also the costs of defending oneself (or one’s organisation) from it and the costs of clearing up after an attack. And then there are the opportunity costs: at the moment, for example, security software used by online merchants typically rejects 4.3% of orders out of fear of fraud, even though many of those potential orders are in fact genuine.
The reality we face, therefore, is that cybercrime is vast and burgeoning. But do not expect to hear much about it in the election – or afterwards, as the new government sets about inflicting swingeing cuts on police forces amid absurd rhetoric about “bobbies on the beat” when what we actually need are more bobbies on the net.