New top fraud cop makes a splash – Interview

Britain’s top insurance fraud cop has come out with all guns blazing.

He’s only been in the job as head of the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) since November, but Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Fyfe has been hard to miss.

A 26-year veteran of the City Police, Fyfe (pictured)  has launched a series of high profile campaigns in the press and on social media to tackle some of the most perfidious and persistent insurance frauds.

Since the turn of the year, Fyfe’s campaigns have been on TV, radio and the front pages of national newspapers. He was a key supporter of the Insurance Fraud Bureau’s Crash for Cash Awareness day on 29 January – the day you’re most likely to become a victim of crash for cash fraud.

And since then he’s championed IFED’s own campaigns on ghost broking and Bribery Act offences.

Fyfe took over from the outgoing DCI Oliver Little, who since 2014, had led the team to over 100 arrests, 150 convictions and more than 300 judicial outcomes. He left to become the new head of the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU).

Since taking over: Fyfe has already overseen 99 arrests, 

“One of the things I am trying to do is shore-up, strengthen our work and what we do in terms of what we call ‘protect and prevent’,” he says.

Ghost broking

On 5 February, IFED launched a campaign to raise awareness of ghost broking, after more than 850 ghost broking cases in the last three years.

IFED blitzed newspapers, TV, radio and social media, with Fyfe popping up on BBC radio and Sky News, and the campaign making the national newspapers, including the front page of the Sunday Telegraph.

Young drivers looking for affordable car insurance are the main victims of ghost broking, and they were also the main targets of IFED’s campaign. Social media outlets were flooded with slogans such as: “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is”, “Don’t be tempted by fraudsters selling cheap car insurance – It’ll end up costing a lot more down the road”, and “Men aged 20-29 are most likely to fall victim to car insurance fraudsters”.

“You see a lot of young people tempted to go for what they think is a good deal, naturally,” Fyfe says. “Ghost brokers target people who are looking for an easy way to find cheap insurance; who get attracted to what looks like a good deal.

“They go for that deal just to get the insurance tax certificate,” he says.

“You don’t want these people being embarrassed, if they get stopped by police, whether it is road checks, or for an accident; finding these people haven’t got insurance, even though they wave the certificate around.”

Fyfe has sympathy for the victims of ghost broking, and points to the need to raise awareness.

“It can cost a teenager several thousand pounds to insure an old banger. Why wouldn’t they look for something cheaper? But they don’t realise that there isn’t any real insurance behind it. It is going to get them in trouble.”

And he points out that ghost broking not only harms the customer, it affects the insurance companies whom the fraudsters purport to represent.

“These people who are committing these crimes are besmirching the name of the major companies and the industry. People are claiming on insurance which they think came from one of these big companies, then these companies are having to divert their resources and time in telling people ‘sorry, but you really haven’t got insurance there’. It is harming their reputation when they are nothing to do with these ghost-broker operations.”

Bribery Act offences

Fyfe is also turning his guns on Bribery Act offences, where insurance company employees are enticed into releasing customer data to third parties. He says he aims to target not only the individuals who steal the data and the employees of claims management companies or law firms who bribe them; but he has also pledged to go after the CMC and solicitor firms themselves who are either complicit in the offence or just don’t do enough to stop their employees approaching insurance company employees.

“We are looking to explore section 7 of the Bribery Act (2010), which would go against the company that allows their employee or turns a blind eye for an employee who goes around bribing someone else.

“Not only can we go for the people who made the approaches and offered the bribes, but we can also go to the company who didn’t do enough to stop that happening in their name.

“So, we could be looking to take out the entire company. All bosses, the board, partners, whoever they might be because, under section 7 of the bribery act, they have failed to prevent bribery in their name.”

Fyfe echoes the kind of zero-tolerance policing for insurance that is credited with clearing up crime in New York.

“These lower-level crimes are, in their own way, just as corrosive in society as the major scale crime,” he says.

“I am looking to go after the company itself. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”