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Police: Businesses must reveal e-crime

Published: 20 Aug 2007 10:00 BST

Businesses must tell the police when they fall victim to e-crime but are often too embarrassed to do so, according to a high-ranking police officer.

Detective chief superintendent Chris Corcoran of North Wales Police, chair of the E-crime Wales Unit and member of the National E-crime Forum, said: "We need to get a true picture of the real problem so we can start to resource it properly, start to link in nationally properly and start to take some informed preventative measures."

Corcoran said: "We can't deal with what we don't know about from a police perspective so — unless people tell us — we can't address the problem."

Police can help by giving e-crime victims advice but businesses and consumers need to come onboard and recognise e-crime is "not high-tech crime but everyday crime", he added.

The UK no longer has a standalone reporting body to deal with e-crime occurrences. Such a body did exist but was incorporated into SOCA (the Serious Organised Crime Agency) last year.

Wales set up its own e-crime steering group three years ago to begin taking action against cybercrimes and recently rolled out a management team to advise and support e-crime victims.

Corcoran added that Welsh businesses are "over the moon" about this service and prefer the personal contact and ownership a region-specific body brings.