This week the Home Office announced the creation of the new Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU). The PCeU promises to tackle cyber crime and clamp down on internet fraud, and will provide ‘specialist officer training and co-ordinate cross-force initiatives to crack down on on-line offences.’

This is to be applauded, particularly given the nature and scope of the problem. Today e-crime is alive and kicking; tomorrow it will be an even greater threat as commercial, business and personal transactions increasingly go virtual.

Just today, for example, The Guardian reported that losses from online banking fraud have tripled, tallying up to £21.4m in the first half of 2008 alone. The private sector is not exempt from cyber crime either; one must only consider the incident with T K Maxx last year, where data thieves extracted the records of over 45 million credit cards.

The government has had e-crime on their radar for quite some time – as the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit attests to – but until now it has lacked a coordinated strategy for dealing with these issues.

It should be the role of the PCeU to provide such a strategy, though needless to say this is a tall order. Not only must it develop a cutting edge investigative capability, but also work together with 42 police forces across the country, which is easier said than done.

Both of these challenges are reminiscent of crime fighting in the good old days when things were more black and white. The ‘e’ in front of crime can be confusing, sometimes introducing an artificial distinction between electronic crime and crime ‘in the real world’. E-Crime is in fact very real, so the title merely refers to how and where it takes place. The web may be the new battleground, but we're still fighting the same old crimes.

By Sebastian Fox, Programme Executive