Traditional bank robbery is now ‘dying out’ as professional cyber criminals carry out increasingly organised and lucrative raids, according to the head of Interpol
Crimes like the Hatton Garden heist are being replaced by cyber-raids as bank robberies become a thing of the past, the head of Interpol has said.
Jürgen Stock said highly organised digital attackers are taking over from armed blaggers, as the world increasingly goes online. Mr Stock said new criminal gangs behave like international corporate enterprises and offer services like the Yellow Pages, including customer hotlines and online ratings systems.
Around 70% of fraud in the UK is committed by criminals abroad, with £3 billion lost to overseas accounts last year.
Speaking in London on Tuesday, Mr Stock warned that the world was facing an “epidemic in the growth of financial fraud”, leading to individuals, often vulnerable people, being defrauded on a “massive and global scale”.
He said: “In some countries crime statistics are indicating that almost sixty to seventy per cent of all criminal activities reported to law enforcement are conducted online. That’s why I’m saying that the classical bank robbery is about to die out.
Only the less skilled or equipped criminals would go for the risks regarding a bank robbery in the classical sense. It’s much easier to attack the bank online.” The 2015 Hatton Garden heist was one of the last large organised raids in the UK and was executed by a gang of old fashioned criminals.
Mastermind Brian Reader was 77 at the time of the £14million burglary while the youngest member of the gang was 54-year-old Michael Seed, known as “Basil”. Mr Stock said that as crime changes the profile of police officers needs to change, with the emphasis shifting in some areas of law enforcement from physical attributes to technical skills.
Mr Stock said: “It used to be that a police officer needed to be able to run fast to catch the criminals and should not wear glasses. This has been changing, today’s world is more diverse than when I was a young police officer. We need IT experts today, we are competing with the IT companies for the best talents. The profile of the investigator in the cyber world is very different.”
He said urgent action was needed to deal with the rapid increase in the volume of organised crime which is becoming “more powerful and more dangerous”. Mr Stock said: “We see a completely new business model of criminals organising themselves. “They are offering cybercrime as a service, money laundering as a service and other support for criminal activity as a service in the underground economy, dark web and on the internet. These criminals do not know each other, they operate with nicknames primarily.
“There is a system where they even get a kind of rating, whether their criminal support is reliable or not. They organise themselves in a very dynamic way based on certain skills. Criminals are offering their good and services like the Yellow Pages of the past. You can simply buy the services direct including a kind of hotline you can call if you have a problem.”
