Fraud Alert

Introduction

The Fraud Alert pages have been set up in conjunction with the Economic and Specialist Crime OCU as a resource to assist in combating specific types of fraud, and to prevent you becoming a victim of crime, through the prevention advice and disruption activity. If you have been a victim of fraud, we cannot accept reports of crime through the Fraud Alert website. You will need to attend or telephone your local police station to make the report.

Depending on your broswer use the links below to bookmark our site:

• Internet Explorer users.
• Mozilla Firefox users.

If you are sending us emails that you believe are fraudulent, we need the email headers to disrupt the fraudulent activity. Please see below how to obtain this:

• Information required by Fraud Alert (Internet headers).

Please send all banking related phishing emails to reports@banksafeonline.org.uk. Queries related to Paypal or Ebay should be sent to spoof@paypal.co.uk and spoof@ebay.co.uk respectively. Please copy us into any emails that are sent to these organisations.

Please note we will not respond to ALL emails sent into the Fraud Alert team, unless we require further information or clarification from you. We apologise for this, but this is necessary due to the volume of email traffic we are receiving.

See our PDF for a full introduction:

• Sterling - Economic crime strategy for London - (332Kb PDF)

On this site the following are available:

• Printing machine advance fee frauds
• Vehicle buying and selling advice
• Internet auction fraud
• Money Transer – High Volume Fraud
• 419 Fraud
• Identity Fraud
• Company Fraud
• Employee Fraud
• Internet Fraud
• ATM (Automated Teller Machine) attacks
• Lotto Fraud
• Money Laundering and asset seizure
• High Yield Investment Fraud
• Criminal cashback

News

• Creation of the London Fraud Forum - 03.07.2007
• Holiday fraud investigation update - 02.07.2007
• VSTAG launches guide on how to be safe when buying and selling a vehicle - 01.06.07
• Emails and letter purporting to be from the Special EU Programmes Body - 20.04.07
• Identity theft advice from the ICO - 03.04.07
• Telephone phishing - new methods deployed - 19.03.07
• Fake MPS website shut down - 19.03.07
• Ministry of Finance scam - 28.02.07
• Office of Fair Trading press release: warning agains 'Secret Shopper' scam - 22.12.06
• OGC Impersonation - 13.12.06
• Holiday Website Fraud - 08.11.2006
• Fraud Company Payment Warning - 18.10.2006
• National Identity Fraud Prevention Week is 16th - 22nd October 2006
• Identity fraud Consumer Awareness Group advice for students - in PDF format (79KB) - 02.10.2006
• US postal money orders - 18.09.2006
• Potential Holiday website frauds - 07.09.2006
• Employment frauds over the internet - 06.09.2006
• Phishing attacks - new variations - 01.09.2006
• Internet vehicle buyers purporting to be sent by ebay - 15.08.2006
• Investment warning – maxonglobal.com - 15.08.2006
• Attempts to obtain authentication codes for webfiling - 14.08.2006
• Phishing attacks - new variations - 07.08.2006
• False 'Fraud Alert' email - 03.08.2006
• Advanced fee and lotto frauds - 28.07.06
• Phishing attacks - new variations - 11.07.06
• Lottery scams development - 25.05.06
• Company identity fraud - 20.04.06
• New Lottery scam - 18.04.06
• Working from home scams - 18.04.06
• Account phishing scam using the FSA identity - 31.03.06
• Working from home scams/financial intermediaries - 30.03.06
• Hotels - Criminal cash back fraud - 28.03.06
• Identity Theft using bogus traffic offence form - 16.03.06
• Bogus Gems scams - 16.03.06
• Harry Potter casting advance fee fraud scams - 28.02.06

Helpful information

If as a result of one of these frauds or any other type of fraud, you have become a victim of crime, you will need to attend your local police station to report the allegation. If you are a resident in Greater London area this link will provide details of your local police station.

If you are resident outside the London area the following link will provide you with details of your local force website from which you can obtain details of your local police station.

Currently there is no facility in the UK to report fraud offences on line.