False Positives Make Crime Go Unpunished!

That's the usual case - when the Police receives too many complaints, some get unnoticed and some criminals remain unpunished. Some people panic too much and send the Police a lot of notifications regarding suspicious activities. For example, up to 300.000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed every month in the U.S., and up to 200,000 a year in the U.K, as I've seen on ComputerWorld's site. You can imagine that with the way the web is evolving, the number of such reports won't decrease, anytime soon. So, they are facing piles and piles of "would-be crimes".

They can't possibly tell from the beginning which is a crime and which is not, so a little bit of analysis is required. With the number of policemen being limited and the number of frauds growing (especially on the Web) it's easy to imagine how a lot of crimes will go unnoticed. And the police is not really to blame - they can't do any better in this situation, I don't think that anyone could.

As the same source informs, Colin Woodcock, head of the fraud section in the UK's Serious Organized Crime Agency said, during a panel discussion: "Let's not forget they are suspicious activity reports. Now, if the police or anybody really were expected to act on everything that is suspicious, we would be bogged down in the first five seconds of operation."

So, basically it's a two-edged blade. They're supposed to battle fraud, but because they're so open about things and asked anyone who might notice some suspicious activity to report it, they've become inefficient. This is also an effect of insufficient computing power - more capable computers for the Police would mean better data management, but let's face it... would more computers make a significant difference when talking about such enormous fraud numbers?