Criminals ‘answer calls at fraud helpline centre’ and one picked up tips on how to be a conwoman 

A fraud reporting centre hires staff with criminal records to take calls from victims of scams and cyber crime, it has been alleged.

Convicts can reportedly be employed by Action Fraud, through outsourcing company Concentrix, to take crime reports as long as their past offences do not make them ‘high risk’ and they were honest in their applications.

But in one case, a female call handler with a criminal past is said to have used the tactics she learnt during her training at the Scottish call centre to later try to commit fraud.

It follows revelations that call handlers were trained to mislead their victims into thinking their cases would be investigated – when most were never looked at again.

Although most crimes are reported to local police forces, fraud victims are told to log their cases with Action Fraud, a national service.

City of London Police oversee this, but the running of the Action Fraud call centre has been outsourced to Concentrix, a US company.

The leniency on criminal pasts was exposed by an undercover reporter at The Times while being trained at the call centre, which is on a Concentrix site in Gourock, a town west of Glasgow.

Michael Rodgers, the City of London police training manager, reportedly told staff: ‘There are some people that have got convictions and they’re in there because they were honest about it.’

When questioned on what sort of crimes they may have committed, he replied they were ‘like driving offences, breach of the peace, all that kind of stuff’.

With turnover of staff very high, Frankie Cully, the company’s in-house recruiter for Action Fraud, is said to have joked that at some point ‘there won’t be anyone else to recruit in this town’. She allegedly said: ‘For criminal convictions there’s not a lot that would stop you getting the role. What I’ve found from experience is just to declare everything up front.

Convicts can reportedly be employed by Action Fraud, through outsourcing company Concentrix, to take crime reports as long as their past offences do not make them ‘high risk’ and they were honest in their applications. (Stock Image)

‘We had somebody who worked here, a really good worker as well, some young girl. She then took the information she learnt here to go out and defraud other people.’

Mr Rodgers said the young woman was hired after failing to disclose a criminal conviction but was fired after a police vetting team found out. He said that she is now under investigation on suspicion of committing fraud. He added: ‘[A colleague] actually re-interviewed her. She was waiting to be interviewed and I was like, why is she sitting in there? You do realise who she is, don’t you?’

City of London Police told The Times that staff were vetted to standards set by the College of Policing. A spokesman pledged to ‘take immediate action should anyone be found to have lied on their vetting forms or committed an offence whilst working for us’.

He added: ‘This can include dismissal in the most serious cases.’

The force has asked Concentrix to investigate reports of staff being drunk at work, taking recreational drugs and abusing prescription pain medication.

Concentrix has suspended four staff members. Its spokesman said it has ‘strict hiring guidelines’ and that staff vetting is performed by the police.

It said it has a ‘zero-tolerance stance on drugs and alcohol’ and ‘any attempted act of fraud or deception will not be tolerated’.