Police limit e-crime probes

Local police are imposing a threshold value below which e-crimes are not investigated, according to UK businesses who regularly report offences.

Lack of technical knowledge and investigation tools means police are setting informal financial limits, it emerged last week.

Garreth Griffith, head of trust and safety at eBay UK, told a House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Personal Internet Security that many crimes go unreported as a result.

‘When we try to get police involved sometimes they will say: “We’d love to help you but if it is not over x threshold thousands of pounds, we cannot”,’ he said.

‘The priorities are generally around higher-value issues. What happens on eBay tends to be lower-value higher-volume crimes.’

Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at electronic payments firm PayPal, says this practice is resulting in unnecessary crimes being committed.

‘You could argue that this is causing the public real harm,’ he said. ‘You will often find there is a threshold before you can get a prosecutor interested in a case. What we do is slowly build a dossier on an individual [perpetrator] until they reach the threshold.’

Detective sergeant Damian Morgan of West Midlands Police’s high-tech crime unit says thresholds do not officially exist, but such decisions may take place.

‘There are no threshold policies written down on paper,’ he said. ‘But there may be local decisions being made on these crimes and how far they get investigated, rather than a central policy being written. This may also be the case in other local forces.’

Rick Naylor, vice president of the Police Superintendents Association, says he is unaware of such thresholds in normal policing.

‘This kind of threshold does not apply to other sorts of crime: we deal with low-value shop crime on a regular basis,’ he said. ‘We do not usually put a financial limit on dealing with crime.’

But eBay’s Griffith says his organisation encourages customers to report crimes to local police.

‘What we find is users come back to us saying the police are not interested because it’s only a £500 laptop, or whatever it might be,’ said Griffith.

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