Love Business Hate Fraud – preventing staff fraud
Love Business. Hate Fraud is a national campaign from the Fraud Advisory Panel and Barclays Bank to raise awareness of fraud and cybercrime against UK businesses, especially small ones.
It comes as a new survey, commissioned to support the launch of the campaign, found that 44% of SMEs, and 49% of all businesses, agreed that fraud was a major risk to growing their business over the next two years.
The NBCC spoke to Alan Bryce, Business Fraud Campaign Manager of the Fraud Advisory Panel about the campaign and why it's so important:
"In our newly launched Love Business Hate Fraud campaign supporting small businesses prevent fraud, we call it “staff fraud”. Others call it “insider fraud” or sometimes just “employee fraud”. Whatever name you use, whether you are a small family run business or a large international company, spotting and stopping staff fraud can prevent financial loss, protect your businesses reputation and might even save it from collapse. In my experience, first as Head of Counter Fraud & Cybercrime at the Charity Commission and more recently as the Business Fraud Campaign Manager at the Fraud Advisory Panel, fraud has the potential if unchecked to financial ruin an organisation, especially small businesses. That is why for the next three months of the Love Business Hate Fraud campaign we will be focusing on the risk of staff fraud.
"The Love Business Hate Fraud campaign, launched in June 2022, is run by the Fraud Advisory Panel and sponsored by Barclays bank. We are supported by organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses, Institute of Chartered Accountants England & Wales, City of London Police and National Cyber Security Centre as well as a wide variety of business groups and financial services organisations. In every quarter of our year-long campaign we give particular attention to a different fraud risk, especially those faced by smaller businesses. We started with procurement fraud. From September we consider staff fraud and later in the campaign cybercrime and fraud risk management. For every quarter there is a summary good practice guide, practical checklist and top tips video.
"Every six weeks we publish a short summary of current and emerging fraud and cyber-crime threats facing businesses. These are drawn from our Business Fraud Watch group of experts who share their information and concerns, suggesting practical advice and solutions that businesses should consider. Throughout the year we also run a series of webinars on different fraud risks. The next, a practical guide to due diligence checks in the procurement process, is on 13th September. On the 27th October, our webinar considers the risks of staff fraud to small businesses and the simple but key checks all businesses should be undertaking on their staff.
"For the first time ever, fraud is now considered the crime that hits small businesses hardest. That is what SME’s have been telling us in research undertaken to launch the Love Business Hate Fraud campaign. Perhaps of most concern is that the research also found that for all businesses, regardless of their size, twice as many as not now view fraud as a major risk to growing their own business over the next two years."
For further information on the Love Business Hate Fraud campaign, freely available material such as supporters packs, guides, top tip videos and animations, myths of the month, webinars or just to download information on the latest fraud threats to look out for, go to https://lovebusiness-hatefraud.org.uk/
