To: The UK Government
Set Up A Fully-Funded, Trained National Fraud and Economic Crimes Division
Set up and fund with FCA penalties a national fraud crimes investigation unit, comprising forensic accountants, financial detectives, and a police division able to reclaim victims' funds, and seize the assets of economic criminal syndicates, and to prosecute banks for failing to protect their customers' money through a lack of due-diligence on their customers' behalf.
Why is this important?
Action Fraud has been exposed as a sham, lip-service to what is a growing epidemic of economic crime, leading to poorly conducted police investigations and ineffective justice and recompense for victims. Meanwhile fraudsters and scammers get away with it time and again, succeeding in misrepresenting non-existent investments or opportunities. The banking industry for the last three years has even known - and has remained silent - about a false-investments online platform made available through licence-charges to criminal syndicates to simulate non-existent investments to give the appearance to victims that their defrauded funds are being invested in realistic-looking investments, which don't actually exist.
Meanwhile, FCA fines imposed on financial institutions that were complicit either knowingly or unknowingly in the fraud are directed to the treasury, without being earmarked for any kind of national fraud investigation agency.
Scamming and fraud, which has become sophisticated and very professional in the last decade, has risen by at least 10% in the last three years without any sign of slowing or being tackled properly. Instead, police forces play pass-the-parcel with economic crimes cases and nobody takes responsibility for investigating these crimes.
A lack of a proper concerted government-led response in establishing a national economic crimes and restitution unit demonstrates that the government of the UK in reality doesn't care for individuals who have been played or scammed by sophisticated and persuasive fraudsters, and it reveals that the government and police-forces of the UK would rather engage in blaming the victims rather than the criminals, thereby endorsing economic crimes and their perpetrators.
