E-crime: most expensive retail crime in UK

According to the Retail Crime Survey 2012, by British Retail Consortium (BRC), the overall cost of retail crime has jumped by 15.6 percent, reaching GBP 1.6 billion. Of that total cost, which covers the value of goods stolen, damage incurred as well as crime prevention measures for the future, almost 37 percent came from e-crime.

Data unveils that the most common retail crime was customer theft, accounting for 83 percent of all incidents, but only 12 percent of those thefts were reported to the police in 2012. That is down from the 47 percent of thefts reported in 2011.

The same source points out that fraud has amounted to 26 percent of the cost of retail crime, while customer theft has accounted for 28 percent. Employee theft has represented 4 percent of the cost of retail crime, while burglaries have accounted for 2.9 percent, criminal damage 1 percent and robberies for 0.7 percent of the cost.

Research shows that from 2011 to 2012, e-crime cost the retail sector GBP 205.4 million, including GBP 77.3 million in losses from identification-related fraud such as account takeovers (GBP 20 million), card-related fraud (GBP 15 million) and refund frauds (GBP 1.2 million). The retail sector has spent at least GBP 16.5 million on security, including payments to banks for systems such as 3D Secure and chargebacks. But the biggest cost (GBP 111.6 million) was the estimated lost revenue that came as legitimate orders were rejected through online fraud prevention measures.

The study also finds that over 20 percent of retailers have reported disruption following distributed denial of service attacks, while phishing was also a serious issue. Findings also reveal that UK brands and companies are currently the second most targeted in such phishing attacks, in which the aim is to steal personal data. Almost 86 percent of phishing or hacking attacks originate from within the UK, although retailers may find it difficult to distinguish where the attacks come from.