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A team of investigators dedicated to fighting payments fraud in the United Kingdom has made some 500 arrests since its founding in 2002, one of the unit's detectives tells CardLine Global sister publication Cards&Payments. The group, the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Card Crime Unit, enjoys the backing of UK card-industry trade association APACS and annual funding of about £5 million (US$8.8 million or 6.4 million euros) from 29 financial institutions. That makes the group among the best-funded public-private efforts to fight card data theft and fraud in the world, according to Cards&Payments. Of the arrests, about 95% have led to convictions, says John Folan, detective chief inspector for the unit. The unit's 38 investigators, a mix of City of London sworn officers, Metropolitan London police and bank investigators, carefully choose which cases to pursue, focusing only on those most likely to make big dents in UK card crime. For example, the unit shies away from older crimes or those that have occurred over the course of several years. Since APACS founded the unit in April 2002, the unit's work has saved the British payments industry an estimated £250 million, Folan says. The unit has a new fraud intelligence-sharing system, a repository for fraud data that financial institutions share. "We can manipulate and analyze the data, then send it back to our members," Folan says. "For example, criminals can have a mobile phone that's involved in more than one fraud. That number might appear on several [Web] sites."
