Police chiefs are reportedly looking for an external company to run the UK’s national fraud and cyber-crime reporting centre, Action Fraud.
According to British newspaper The Times, they are drawing up a contract worth £40m–£60m ($77m, €65.4m) over five years.
Currently, Action Fraud is run by the City of London Police and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.
Too many complaints?
Official figures from Action Fraud show that, in 2018 alone, savers lost over £197m from 6,759 investment scams, averaging at a loss of £29,000 per individual.
Additionally, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and The Pensions Regulator (TPR) recently revealed that, since 2017, the reporting centre received complaints regarding £30.8m lost to pension fraudsters.
But a recent freedom of information request from Quilter revealed just 6.6% of reported pension scams are passed to the police.
A spokesperson for Action Fraud, told International Adviser: “The contract that City of London Police has with IBM was for five years; therefore we are in the process of re-procuring.
“Public sector procurement processes are governed by strict regulations and we will not be in a position to provide any details on the process or participants. In a similar vein, we are not able to go into detail about our contract or commercial arrangement with IBM.”
