Identity crimes in the UK: An examination of the strategies employed by front-line practitioners in the public and private sector to detect, prevent and mitigate against this crime

Identity related crimes are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern society. It is a crime type that concerns and impacts governments, private institutions and consumers worldwide. The aim of this research was to provide a better insight into how this crime is perceived by government and commercial institutions in the UK (including their views on offenders and victims), to review the processes employed by the public and private sector to assess risk and develop mitigation and prevention strategies and, in doing so, to discover how the most prominent criminological theories contribute to these efforts. Its final aim was to examine the current state and effectiveness of the collaborations and partnerships which have been developed across the public/private sector spectrum to understand and combat this crime.
The methodology employed to undertake this research was based on conducting interviews with the key identity fraud and crime practitioners within major public and private organisations. Qualitative research was used in order to generate as much information as possible to form ideas. In addition, documents were also examined to complement the data collected from interviews. The researcher, due to previous employment within the UK financial sector dealing payment fraud, was ideally placed to access, and generate participation across government, law enforcement and other commercial organisations.
The study highlights the current thinking and approaches by front-line identity crime prevention practitioners in defining, perceiving, measuring, policing, detecting, preventing and mitigating identity crime. It also highlights how heavily existing situational crime prevention techniques are being used to combat this issue and how they are complemented by partnership approaches and, most importantly, data-sharing which is widely accepted by practitioners as being a vitally effective tool in dealing with this issue. Problems exist in the majority of these areas with the central concern being the lack of leadership from the government in taking ownership of this insidious and escalating crime type which creates commercial and individual victims but also significantly, enables serious crimes such as human and drug trafficking and terrorism. Equally pressing is the need for the commercial sector, instead of treating identity crime as a phenomenon to be denied or ignored (or as one which needs to be accepted as a cost of doing business) to improve data sharing, strengthen its defences and review its approach to the treatment and support of victims.