Credit Card Fraud No Longer a Crime

So we find out today that credit card fraud in the UK is no longer a criminal offence. The UK government has decided that if a person is a victim of credit card fraud they can not report it to the police as a crime and must simply report it to their bank.

So it’s open season now in the UK - criminals can order anything they like online with no fear of Prosecution or fines or a criminal record.  The Home Office says it’s so the police can concentrate on cases that are more likely to produce a positive outcome - ommitting they are failing at this increase in crime. So let’s hope other criminal offences don’t increase too much otherwise they will be de-criminalised as well.

So expect crime figures to fall now as these will not be reported in any statistics. 

But of course it’s never the banks who suffer in any case because they just charge back any “suspected” crime back to the merchant. So the merchant loses the goods, gets a chargeback fee and still has to pay the transaction % on the orginal transaction.

So who can protect merchants from fraud because the cardholder always gets their money back ? Trawling through the internet doesn’t really bring up any responses. If a transaction is made before the cardholder reports it lost or stolen, why should the merchant suffer through their problems ?