The Home Office is under scrutiny today as it has been accused of not investigating incidents of credit card fraud seriously.

APACS, the UK trade association for payments, has released figures which state ‘fraud on lost or stolen cards totaled £89m in 2005 and counterfeit card fraud amounted to £96.8m’ in the same year. The facts show that card crime is high, just last year ‘700,000 individual cases were reported, with the average loss per case amounting to £608.’

This criticism follows a change in the law, backed by the Home Office, which states victims can no longer report fraudulent incidents directly to the police. The new law asserts that banks have the prerogative to decide which cases should be investigated further.

The thought of banks having greater discretion regarding this matter is worrying consumers. Bank employees do not have the knowledge or expertise that police teams have in tracing crime. This is why it is, “astonishing that the Home Office seems perfectly happy to just rely on the banks to sort it out,” said Tory e-crime spokesman James Brokenshire.

A BBC Newsnight programme revealed that since the new laws have come into place, some police forces have received no reports of card crime. Prof Anderson, a security specialist at Cambridge University, accused the police and the Home Office of wanting to “massage the crime statistics downwards”.

If financial institutions are picking and choosing which cases should be passed onto the police this leaves consumers powerless to act when and opens up the banks to be accussed of covering up the true extent of credit fraud.