Britain’s former top fraud-buster reveals how he himself was nearly duped by scammers

Britain’s former top fraudster has revealed how he himself was nearly cheated by scammers.

Sir David Green, who ran the Serious Fraud Office for six years until 2018, said his 98-year-old father asked him for help, saying he had taken a call from BT about a debt of around £100.

“I picked up the phone and got someone on the line right away, who sounded completely plausible,” Green said. “It wasn’t until they started asking for my father’s personal information that I realized something wasn’t right and I cut them short.

“I was talking to a scammer. They almost took me in – and I ran the Serious Fraud Office and handled fraud cases every day.”

Green, who now works for US law firm Cohen & Gresser, said it was clear that fraudsters buy lists from older people who have some money but grew up in a generation that trusted authority.

“They tend to believe what someone who says they’re from a bank or a big company tells them, and act quite deferential towards them,” he said.

Green also warned that organized crime is behind increasingly sophisticated fraud. Fraud represented 40 per cent of reported crime in 2021, when there were more than 400,000 reports of online fraud and cybercrime in the UK – a one-third increase on the previous year.

“And this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Green added in an op-ed published this weekend on The Mail+.

His biggest priority now is awareness. “The risks of fraud should be taught in schools, just as in my day a uniformed cop would come and teach the kids how crosswalks work,” he said.