Prevalence of fraudulent incidents (FOI)

Request

Please provide statistics on the number of reported fraudulent incidents over the last five years (to March 2021) involving both online and offline buy and sell and rent marketplaces accessible or published in Jersey, the value of these reported incidents, number of live investigations currently, number of successful prosecutions of these incidents by the States of Jersey Police.

The purpose is to understand the scale of such incidents of fraud in Jersey, identify which marketplace platforms online and office have been most susceptible to scammers, so that a conversation and efforts can be had with the relevant parties to improve overall security for Jersey citizens and most importantly, increase awareness among Jersey residents to such types of fraud and what they (and these marketplaces) could and should be doing about the problem themselves, especially in this covid-19 environment.

Response

The request is too broad in that the ‘number of fraudulent incidents’ covers not only criminal fraud cases but other incidents which cannot be simply defined to enable police staff to search police systems for specific events.

There are over 930 crimes recorded where the term ‘fraud’ is used over the past five years. To search these incidents alone, for the information requested would take longer than the time allowed under legislation governing Freedom of information responses. Based on a conservative 10 minutes for each investigation, a maximum of 75 events could be studied and the information requested, retrieved in the time allowed.

In addition to recorded crimes, there have been 240 calls to the police station in the last year alone relating to a matter described by the caller as a fraud and 516 calls where the caller indicated that some form of ‘Scam’ was being perpetrated. The numbers for the past five years have not been assessed.

It is not possible to respond to this enquiry using such a general term as reported fraudulent incidents. It is however clear that the public in Jersey have a good general understanding of cyber security, judging by the amount of reports made to the States Police.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.