{"id":126420,"date":"2026-03-17T20:32:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T23:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tech.einnews.com\/article\/900092874"},"modified":"2026-03-17T20:32:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T23:32:14","slug":"technology-accelerating-crime-boosts-case-for-national-police-service-says-nca-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/technology-accelerating-crime-boosts-case-for-national-police-service-says-nca-chief\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology accelerating crime, boosts case for national police service says NCA chief"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Technology is accelerating crime, making it more global and more harmful, the head of the UK\u2019s National Crime sgency said today.<\/p>\n

Graeme Biggar, the NCA\u2019s director general said criminals were now able to operate in loose networks, and to buy in to crime and money laundering services.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology has given scale and reach to criminals in a way that did not happen 5 years ago,\u201d he said<\/p>\n

In a speech at the NCA headquarters in Stratford, Biggar said that these changes were driving the case for the proposed country-wide police service.<\/p>\n

The National Police Service, dubbed Britain\u2019s FBI, will police serious crime, counter-terrorism and fraud.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology is no longer simply a tool that criminals use. It is reshaping crime itself, accelerating it, globalising it, and making it more harmful he said.<\/p>\n

According to the NCA\u2019s National Strategic Assessment, the threat from serious and organised crime has increased overall.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology has enabled criminals to get smarter, faster and more connected, to each other and to victims,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/i>Teenagers are radicalising<\/h2>\n

He said the boundaries between different types of crime were blurring. Teenagers were being radicalised on the same online spaces, to become cyber criminals, sex offenders or terrorists by the same algorithms.<\/p>\n

Biggar said that the pace of change was \u201cmost acute\u201d in cyber crime, with the last 18 months seeing high-profile cyber attacks on TfL, the Legal Aid Agency, Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Kido nurseries and Jaguar Land Rover.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe majority still originate overseas but we have seen the emergence of UK-based attackers, combining sophisticated malware with social engineering \u2013 exploiting not just technical vulnerabilities but human ones too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Foreign states were in contact with criminals to conduct hostile acts on UK soil and cyber attacks were coming from both state actors and criminal ransomware groups or a combination of the two.<\/p>\n

He said the message for organisations was clear –  securing systems is not enough. They also need to address how people, processes, and supply chains can be manipulated.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

<\/i>Scam centres commit fraud on industrial scale<\/h2>\n

According to the National Strategic Assessment, online fraud continues to grow. Card-not-present fraud and investment fraud are enabled by criminals using the same social engineering techniques, manipulating people into handing over their savings or one-time passwords.<\/p>\n

Scam centers have opened up in South East Asia and west Africa and are conducting online frauds on an industrial scale.<\/p>\n

The NCA said that the number of referrals from technology companies reporting child sexual abuse had risen by a third in two years.<\/p>\n

\u201cTech companies need to face up to their responsibilities in a way they have simply not done yet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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<\/i>Encrypted communications<\/h2>\n

Biggar told Computer Weekly, that organised crime groups had largely moved away from communicating using dedicated encrypted phone networks and had moved onto commercially available encrypted phone apps.<\/p>\n

He said there was a shift after police operations against EncroChat, Sky ECC and Anom.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the same time, commercially available apps that many of us are using all the time also became pretty safe, and so we’ve seen criminals moving much more onto just normal consumer apps that everyone uses,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are still some hardened dedicated secure coms around, but not to the scale of Sky ECC and EncroChat,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have also seen criminals have more face-to-face meetings but not at scale,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

In Operation Venetic, following the take down of EncroChat encrypted phones in 2020, the NCA and police forces have secured 2,437 convictions, mostly of serious drug criminals.<\/p>\n

\u201cSix years on, the number of convictions is increasing. There was so much data, and we have delays in court. Next year that figure will be higher. We are still taking people to court on the basis of that data,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He said that tech companies had a responsibility to design algorithms and encrypted applications with that upheld public safety.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not against end-to-end encryption, just end-to-end encryption that is not designed with public safety in mind,\u201d he said. \u201cThat means that when a law enforcement body has a warrant authorised by a judge, that can be actioned by the company.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biggar said in his speech that technology has seen crime shift from being local to global and from real world to online.<\/p>\n

New threats were emerging in the space between the NCA, counter terrorism policing, Regional Organised Crime Units (Rocus), and police forces.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew threats would be easier to spot and respond to from a single law enforcement body responsible for crime best dealt with nationally,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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… crime has increased overall. \u00e2\u0080\u009cTechnology<\/span> has enabled criminals to … the number of referrals from technology<\/span> companies reporting child sexual … a third in two years. \u00e2\u0080\u009cTech<\/span> companies need to face … said. He said that tech<\/span> companies had a responsibility to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}