Crooks and scammers have been taking advantage of the Coronavirus epidemic to ramp up their fraud operations with a 400% increase in virus-related fraud in March.

It won’t have escaped the attention of those of us in the industry that the Financial Conduct Authority has made changes to the FCA Register, removing the name of all those in customer facing roles (except where they hold a senior management function).   

The FCA issued 400% more clone and scam firm warnings in 2019 than in 2015, according to a Freedom of Information request obtained by Financial Planning Today.

HMRC convicted more than 600 individuals for tax crimes in 2019 and started more than 610 new investigations.