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Reported fraud in the UK during 2011 increased by 50% to stand at more than £2bn. Both the number and average value of reported cases also rose.

These are the findings of accountancy firm BDO’s annual FraudTrack report. It highlights the five primary types of fraud that account for more than 85% of the total: tax fraud (rising to 36%), supplier/customer fraud (rising to 30%), employee fraud (down to 10%), corruption (rising to 4%), and management fraud (down to 5.5%).

Simon Bevan, head of fraud at BDO LLP, believes that a number of factors are at work. The dramatic overall increase might be partly explained by greater focus on the bottom line during a time of economic difficulty. Quite simply, more fraud is being discovered because it is being looked for. Conversely, reported management fraud has dropped because “whistleblowers tend to keep their heads down at times of high unemployment.”

Less easy to explain is the rise in corruption given the UK’s new Bribery Act.

However, fraud will continue to rise thinks Imam Hoque, the managing director of financial crime detection company Detica NetReveal, because it “is becoming the crime of choice for many organized criminals.” It can be conducted from outside of the country (making prosecution difficult), it involves less risk than other crimes (such as drug trafficking), and avoids the challenges of large scale money laundering.

Hoque is seeing a growing interest in products like NetReveal that provide sophisticated network analytics able to identify suspicious behavior and any evidence of organized criminality. “One of the key reasons for this demand,” he says, “is that with relatively small expenditure, firms can cut down the amount of money lost through fraud.”