British police fight huge surge in middle class fraud
Last updated at 8:55 AM on 07th October 2009
Britain is in the grip of a middle-class fraud boom, a top police officer warned yesterday.
Mike Bowron said his officers were arresting lawyers, accountants and insurance brokers over alleged rip-offs worth millions.
Mr Bowron, commissioner of City of London Police, said professional workers had 'exploited their position for personal and illegitimate financial gain'.
He also revealed that the number of frauds reported to his force has risen by 72 per cent in the past financial year.
In many cases, the victims were ' well-educated, confident investors' who are ripped off by plausible graduates taking part in sophisticated scams.
Mr Bowron said many frauds had been exposed by the recession, as investors tried to get their money back.
One of the biggest investigations on his force's books is an 80million Ponzi-style investment fraud which is now thought to have claimed 750 victims, including former England cricketer and Strictly Come Dancing star Darren Gough.
Another high-profile probe centres on an alleged 200million mortgage fraud.
In 2005, the value of reported frauds was put at nearly 14billion by independent academics.
In an interview with the Mail, Mr Bowron said last night: 'We have got something like 6,000 individual victims on our books at the moment.
'The reasons for that are that we have gone looking for fraud, and the consequences of the recession.
'It is a whole combination of mortgage fraud, mass marketing fraud, Ponzi-type fraud, insider fraud and insurance frauds.'
Mr Bowron said his officers have noticed a sharp increase in 'boiler room fraud', where middle-class investors are cold-called by bogus stockbrokers and persuaded to buy worthless or non-existent shares, or to buy genuine shares at vastly inflated prices.
He said 'offenders are generally young, educated Britons'.
He has banned the phrase 'white-collar crime' because it 'infers the type of person who commits this offence is a gentleman when infact it covers a whole raft of villainy'.
Mr Bowron said they had been attracted to fraud by the knowledge that it was lucrative and the risk of being caught was low.