As the UK continues its Lockdown for another three weeks, there is a dishonest part of society that will be taking advantage of the nation’s skeleton staffs and with their minds elsewhere. This dishonest society will be looking to defraud businesses whilst their guards are down and businesses are running on minimal capacity. 

According to Police statistics there has been a spike in levels of fraud up to 400%. This is a common theme in recessions with victims falling prey to fraudsters who take advantage of businesses under greater financial pressure  or people reeling from uncertainty. 

Unfortunately fraudsters are still very active whilst everyone else is more passive, as economic pressure leads people to radically evaluate loyalties and rationalise business behaviour. Fraudsters see this as an opportunity to try their schemes to dishonestly defraud hard working businesses and not all businesses will be immune. 

See below some of the  best approaches to protecting your business as best you can. 

•  Review existing controls, and potentially strengthen then where possible 
• Messages need to be communicated to strengthen the culture of integrity and deter the honest minority,  - Just because we are working from home does not mean we are less vigilant 
• High risk areas both internally and externally need to be profiled and ensure all information is correct 
• Advanced data science techniques need to be deployed to detect abnormal behaviour and payments 
• Organisations need to make sure that they have access to a capacity to undertake lawfully proper remote investigations 
• Organisations also need information and intelligence as the threat of fraud develops and evolves across the economy

Please make sure your business is safe and stay extra vigilant, If anything looks too good to be true, it most likely is, and always do you due diligence on new accounts. If you need ore information then please speak to a member of the team on enquiries@ga-uk.org and if you haven't already then join our Facebook Community and share any scams that you may have been targeted with.