One FTSE company in five falls prey to fraudsters

It is estimated at least one FTSE-listed firm in five has been compromised in internet scams, including some of the world’s biggest names.

Meanwhile a growing number of small to medium businesses which do not have the capacity to defend themselves are also falling prey to the fraudsters, with the latest scam to sweep through Yorkshire this year involving hundreds of companies with potentially millions of pounds stolen.

But with six per cent of Britain’s GDP now generated on the web and this year’s online retail sales scheduled to top £50bn, there is a reluctance among companies to speak out over internet crime 
for fear of damaging revenues by associating themselves with fraud.

David Ransom, chief executive of People United Against Crime, which is working alongside all four Yorkshire police forces to increase awareness among 3,000 businesses across the region, said: “The scale of it has never been seen before; the complexity of it has never been seen before.

“The police traditionally police within county boundaries. There are no boundaries with internet crime.

“The law enforcement agencies are running to catch up.

“If you cannot enforce proficiently, it makes preventing crimes all the more important.”

The now industrial scale of cyber crime has seen the world’s largest organised crime groups take to hiring the expertise of specialist hackers to create huge botnets, hidden networks of tens of thousands of home computers used to churn out malicious software without their owners even knowing.

Increasingly sophisticated “spear phishing” schemes are also being developed where hoax emails are sent purporting to be from work colleagues to obtain passwords and login information.