Law Weblog

New offence to clarify and strengthen fraud law

Thursday 26 May 2005 at 7:00 pm | In News | Post Comment

A new offence of fraud, designed to strengthen the existing law and ease the prosecution process, is the main feature of the Government’s Fraud Bill, which is published today. The new offence, which would carry a maximum sentence of ten years, can be committed in three ways:

• By false representation. An example of the type of act covered by this offence would include “phishing”; or the act of disseminating an email to large groups of people falsely representing to be a legitimate financial institution in order to can gain access to others’ personal financial information.
• By failing to disclose information. For example, a solicitor who fails to share vital information with a client within the context of their work relationship, in order to make a gain from his client, would be committing an offence.
• By abuse of position. This offence would cover a situation where a person employed to care for the elderly or disabled, takes advantage of his position of access to their accounts in order to remove money.

The aim of the Bill is to clarify the current statutory offences, which are very specific and overlapping. This means it is not always clear which offence should be charged, and defendants have successfully argued that their particular deceptive behaviour did not fit the definition of the offence with which they had been charged.

The Fraud Bill will also introduce the new offences of:

• Obtaining services dishonestly. For example, a person who tenders an improperly obtained credit card to obtain services from the Internet would be committing a crime under this offence.
• Possessing articles or use in frauds. This would make it an offence to possess, manufacture or supply equipment, such as a computer programme that can generate genuine credit card numbers, to be used to commit or facilitate fraud.
• Participating in fraudulent business. This offence extends the existing offence of fraudulent trading by incorporated bodies to businesses other than companies.

Full details here.