18 April 2018 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
Action Fraud is the UK's national fraud and cyber-crime reporting centre. It's a web-based system that provides a central point of contact between the public and the police for information relating to fraud and cyber-crime. All attempted frauds at your institution should be reported via the Action Fraud system (whether or not you also alert your local police department) so that the information can be collaborated and action taken.
One of the most common gripes from counter-fraud colleagues though is that fraud attempts they report to the Police via Action Fraud are not acted on. While the quantity of frauds reported, and Police resource restrictions, does mean that unfortunately not every attempt can be addressed, there are ways that you can report to Action Fraud that will increase the likelihood of your report being useful to the authorities.
Firstly, always report your fraud or fraud attempt as soon as you can after it’s been discovered. Don’t wait and upload attempts once a week or once a month. Fraud risk analysis is time-sensitive, as ActionFraud uses computer intelligence to aggregate and assess some reports. Spikes in reports at a certain time are more likely to be acted on, so don’t wait to submit.
Secondly, if this means that you would spend forever submitting, note that your university can apply for the Business Reporting Tool (BRT) that allows bulk uploads. This might help you keep on top of reporting.
Finally, when you’re filling out the report, don’t put lots of information in the free text areas – these are only read if the report is investigated in more detail, so you might be wasting your time. Instead, just put key information against the scored boxes. This will make it more likely to be read by the analysers.
