Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 31 May 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Authorised Push Payments Fraud: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Justin Kelly:

I suppose with ICT resources, the Deputy is talking about our incident recording and how we record our crime incidents. We have a very robust system around that. We have the ability to do deep analysis of things if we need it. On the public, we spend a lot of time on publicity campaigns on all the various types of economic crime the committee has been discussing to encourage people to come forward. Our strategy is twofold: enforcement and education. Education around publicity to the public is one part but it is also about discouraging people, particularly students and unemployed people, from becoming involved in it. We are seeing a lot of people over 55 years becoming involved in money muling. A lot people aged 18 to 24 years is the demographic around students and the unemployed. We spend a lot of time in colleges and have done a lot of social media work around discouraging people from becoming involved in that. I see the Deputy’s point around our showing that we do recover funds. I would say we spend a lot of time and effort on this area. We have a fraud awareness week where there is intensive publicity, and there are various dates during the year. The Deputy has probably seen how, around St. Valentine’s Day, we put a particular emphasis on romance fraud.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.