Brit business question e-Crime unit's worth

£7m venture to fight cybercrime, but is it wasted money?

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6 October 2008 11:37 GMT / By Katie Scott

A newly created police unit, whose sole mandate is to fight cybercrime, is already attracting criticism.

The £7m Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) will start its work in spring next year, and is hoped will help fight a global cybercrime industry, which is now estimated to be worth £105bn.

Its mandate will include any kind of crime online from serious fraud to international crime rings.

But, business in the UK are already arguing that the unit is not going to be effective.

In particular, they are criticising the fact that it will not centrally collate all reports of e-crime from the country's 44 local forces.

Instead it is going to liaise with the National Policing Improvement Agency to perhaps change how e-crime reports made to local forces are handled.

The new unit will also help train police officers in local forces to handle e-Crimes.

This admittal by the Home Office has fueled skepticism about the unit, which will receive £7m funding over three years - which businesses say is simply not enough.

David Roberts, chief executive of the Corporate IT Forum which represents IT users with a turnover of more than £300m told the website silicon.com: "£7m over three years seems a very small sum for a very large problem".

"We doubt whether it will be enough to tackle an issue that the Home Office itself calls a global menace - something our own members know all too well. The PCeU seems a good start but it must be the beginning of something much bigger and better."

Gareth Elliott, policy adviser with the British Chambers of Commerce, added to ZDNet: "It is a step in the right direction but £7m does not seem like very much compared to the cost of cybercrime".