Our relationships with police and law enforcement agencies are particularly important to us and our members. We work with them to assist in the prevention of fraud and financial crime; to support the disruption of financial criminals; to protect the public and the UK economy from the adverse effects of fraud and financial crime.

In 2015, our members reported more than 800 cases a day to the City of London National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

One of the biggest milestones achieved in 2015 was the inclusion of these cases in the official Crime Statistics. Cifas fraud offences were not previously included as Police Recorded Crime in the crime survey, and their inclusion will help to develop a better understanding of the full extent of fraudulent activity in the UK.

By the end of 2015, the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau had disseminated 2,631 crime packages containing 10,725 Cifas reports. In 2014 it disseminated 776 crime packages containing 2,969 Cifas reports. This means that in 2015 we saw a 239% rise in NFIB Crime Packages containing Cifas data, and a 261% rise in Cifas reports disseminated as part of those packages. This is a welcome and encouraging increase, and testament to the City of London Police's increasing focus on tackling fraud.

In addition to this data we provided operational intelligence to support police and law enforcement in the detection and apprehension of criminals, including supplying Cifas information to the National Crime Agency to support specific operations into suspected money laundering and corrupt professionals, and helped intelligence building on other types of financial or financially-related crime. We provided a ‘request for information’ service for UK police officers to make specific requests for information on potential suspects to support their day to day operations.

Cifas also worked closely with the Metropolitan Police Service Amberhill team to share details of false and Fraudulently Obtained Genuine (FOG) documents with Cifas members, to enable them to prevent and detect frauds. In 2015 Amberhill shared 52 alerts with Cifas containing nearly 7,500 false and FOG document records, which helped Cifas members to prevent frauds of an estimated value of over £2.6 million.

Our Organised Fraud Intelligence Group (OFIG) is the central route offered by Cifas for intelligence and investigation professionals to share information with each other on fraud threats, trends, and techniques. Participants come from Cifas member organisations, law enforcement and other fraud prevention partners. Meetings are held regionally and include London and South East, South West, North, Midlands and Scotland meetings, each of which meet three times a year. An Internal Fraud OFIG meeting also meets three times a year and provides attendees with a dedicated forum to share information on insider fraud specific threats and trends. The information collected at the regional and Internal Fraud OFIG meetings is used to develop fraud prevention outputs to tackle the reported threats, including intelligence assessments that detail prevention measures for members and the wider fraud prevention community to consider. OFIG intelligence assessments released in 2015 included insider fraud threats, invoice redirection, domain slamming, misuse of contactless cards and false document trends.