WE all know about Covid-19 epidemic but the vast majority of people seem to be oblivious to the fraud epidemic raging through the country with growing power and casualties every year.

Action Fraud, the national fraud reporting gateway, has over 30,000 cases of fraud reported every month. In Bournemouth Echo, week after week, cases reported. The latest on September 3: “Dog put down after breeders dupe couple out of £2,500”.

And the very worst of this, Action Fraud pursues less than a dozen cases in the many hundreds they have reported every day. It is staggering – not least a Times undercover journalist in 2019 reporting Action Fraud advisers, and even managers, mocking the very people they should be helping.

Truly beyond terrible when people are losing huge amounts of money up to and including life savings.

That said, the greatest credit to Martyn Underhill, Dorset police and crime commissioner, former lead of national commissioners on fraud, who has campaigned on this issue for many years. In 2019 running a survey with 71 per cent of respondents expressing how dissatisfied they were with Action Fraud. In the commissioner’s words a “deeply depressing” survey outcome.

But then, to quote the historian and great film maker Oliver Stone, we are so often dealing with the “tyranny of now”. So absorbed with daily news cycles – so much that is trivial of no consequence – we lose sight of the bigger picture our national structures over decades have collapsed. Gone. No longer exist. Sold off to any and all international bidders.

County-led police fraud squads displaced many years ago by, in this case, a US-owned call center, Concentrix, with web apps, as outsourced by City of London police.

But there we go, we sell off everything critical to the wellbeing of the country to world-wide private contractors and this is what you get. The cheapest of cheap systems.

As so many testify, victims of fraud – you’re on your own. You cannot report to local police. Banks often blame victims who may simply not understand systems.

Concerned? Then do speak up. Write to your MP, then write again, every week.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Jubilee Road, Parkstone