In April fraud-prevention service Cifas revealed that 174,523 cases of identity fraud had been recorded in the UK during 2017. It noted that a number of victims had been scammed repeatedly.
This type of crime can have lasting ramifications for you and your business. If a loan is taken out fraudulently in your name, for instance, this could damage your credit rating and make it difficult for you to obtain finance of any kind.
If this risk isn’t enough to make a business leader stop and think about who might have access to their personal information, then a 2017 report by Cifas and LexisNexis Risk Solutions surely is. Summarising the findings of a three-year nationwide study, this states that “nearly 19 per cent of identity-fraud victims were directors”, even though they comprise less than nine per cent of the UK population.
This situation may well have been exacerbated by the fact that fraudsters could readily obtain details about directors by checking the register kept by Companies House. This public record is useful if you want to, say, check the background of a potential business partner before signing a contract with them (the IoD’s Business Information Service can perform such due-diligence searches for you).
But it could also be argued that such a resource is not so much a chink in the defence as a wide-open door for fraudsters. The Cifas/LexisNexis report prompted the government to announce new disclosure rules, which have just taken effect, to make life harder for criminals. If you’re a director, the following details about you will now be available via Companies House: name; nationality; occupation; month and year of birth, rather than date; a correspondence (service) address; and a home (residential) address.
Any director can now request the removal of the latter address from the public record. Previously, this was possible only when Companies House and the relevant authorities judged that there was a serious risk that the firm’s activities could result in violence against, or the intimidation of, its officers. You can replace this with a different contact address to ensure that your company meets its legal obligations. The IoD’s Office Solutions service (iod.com/services) can provide advice on setting up such an address.
Criminals are still able to “hijack” a business by changing information about its directors and registered office, which could enable them to make fraudulent purchases in the company’s name. To safeguard against such unauthorised changes, you should join the Proof (protected online filing) scheme run by Companies House. Signing up to this free service will ensure that certain paper forms – including those informing of changes to a firm’s officers and to its registered office – will not be accepted.
Taking such basic steps to protect yourself from identity fraud could ultimately save you from becoming a statistic in next year’s Cifas report.
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