Credit card fraud figures worthless
Thousands of fraud cases go unregistered after police and gendarmes refuse to register complaints
AN INQUIRY has found that online frauds have been hugely underestimated because police and gendarmes were not registering complaints properly.
Statisticians said that official figures for frauds were worthless, as many crimes had not been registered and the figures were much lower than the real rate of crime.
The Observatoire National de la Délinquance et des Réponses Pénales (ONDRP) estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 complaints had disappeared.
It wasa noted that, in 2010, there was an apparent eight per cent drop in the level of credit card fraud, yet at the same time online purchases soared by 30 per cent, with more than 25 million French people buying online. The two graphs should have matched.
A source at the ONDRP told Le Figaro that, when victims had complained, they had simply been given a receipt acknowledging their complaint and it had not been registered as a fraud. It was claimed that the bank, not the card-holder, was the real victim, so the complaint did not need to be registered.
Now the ministry of justice has written to prosecutors saying that refusing to record credit card fraud complaints properly meant that justice officials could not gauge the scale of the problem and that it could be covering up large-scale fraud.
