Fraud investigations mobile operators 237/24
FOI Reference: 237/2024
Request:
I am writing to request information covering 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2023.
1) How many members of staff are dedicated to investigating fraud? Please breakdown by type of staff (for example police officers, police staff, police specials)
- Of these, how many have received dedicated fraud training?
2) The total number of referrals disseminated to your police force by Action Fraud or the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB); and of which how many:
- Were allocated for investigation.
- Were filed without further investigation.
- Resulted in a charge.
3) For each of the categories above (total number of referrals, were allocated for investigation, filed without further investigation, and resulted in a charge) please specify the number of such referrals where one of the major mobile operators (O2, EE, Three or Vodafone) was referenced.
4) How many fraud cases did you take to the CPS for prosecution.
Response
Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 places two duties on public authorities. Unless exemptions apply, the first duty at Section 1(1)(a) is to confirm or deny whether the information specified in a request is held. The second duty at Section 1(1)(b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held.
I can confirm that the cost of determining whether any information relative to question 3 of this request is or isn’t held is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond therefore we are withholding the whole of the requested information since we consider that the Section 12 (2) exemption the Cost of Compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit applies to it.
Where exemptions are relied upon Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Dyfed Powys Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which: (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies. The following exemption has been applied to the whole of the information you have requested:
Section 12(2) – The cost of compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit
Section 12(2) states: “…Subsection (1) does not exempt the public authority from its obligation to comply with paragraph (a) of section 1(1) unless the estimated cost of complying with that paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit.”
The cost of determining what information is held, if any, relevant to question 3 of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the “appropriate level” as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. It is estimated that it would exceed 18 hours (i.e. minimum of 28 hours) to comply with your request. The regulations can be located @ www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2004/20043244.htm
The Freedom of Information Department has been advised that the information in respect of your request is not held in an easily retrievable format. Therefore, in order to establish what information, if any, is held in relation to question 3 of the request would require the individual interrogation of all incidents under the category of ‘O2’, ‘EE’, ‘Three’ or ‘Vodafone’ over the time frame specified to identify if the incident in question related to those providers.
It has been established that for the period as specified within the request (i.e. 2023) there are a total 112 incidents that would require researching. It has been estimated that it would take a minimum of 15 minutes to research a single incident for relevance to question 4 of your request as outlined above, resulting in the following broken down time estimate.
2023 = 112 referred crimes @ 15 minutes per incident = 28 hours
Total of 28 hours to complete task.
Goodwill
A response to questions 1, 2 & 4 of your request has been provided below as a gesture of goodwill and outside of the FOI act.
Question1
A total of,
3 x Police Staff, &
1 x Police Officer
were trained and were in post, dedicated to investigating fraud.
Question 2
The relevant totals are shown below,
112 referrals were disseminated to DPP for investigation.
112 of those referrals were investigated. The force policy is to investigate 100% disseminated to DPP from NFIB.
1 of the referrals resulted in a charge within the specified period, however 83 of the referrals are still under investigation.
Question 4
1 case was referred to the CPS. 83 cases remain under investigation and may be referred to the CPS.
It should be noted that owing to the systems adopted by Dyfed-Powys Police in relation to the recording of such matters the information provided may or may not be accurate.
Police Forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide crime statistics to government bodies and the recoding criteria is set nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted that for these reasons this Force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other response you may receive.
(This is a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and disclosed on 27/02/24)