PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS
This website is full of information that can help protect identities and reduce criminal’s opportunities to commit identity fraud.
If a fraudster can get sufficient information about a business and a person, they may be able to apply for a corporate credit or debit card and go on a spending spree. Such cards can be readily used in electronic transactions.
Advice from Companies House
There are approximately 2.5 million companies on the Register of Companies and Companies House receives around 600,000 documents each month. About 50 of these in any month may be connected to an attempt to commit fraud. Statistically, this looks like a small problem, but the effect of a company hi-jack on an individual company can be very significant and we take the whole issue of fraud very seriously.
Frauds involving company hijacks are committed using paper documents, where it is difficult to build in security features. To counter this problem and to help companies protect themselves, Companies House has developed a three point plan, which we are urging our customers to sign up for.
1. Electronic Filing - In other words, you give us the information about your company electronically. We issue you with a password which ensures that any changes only come from you.
2. Protected Online filing (PROOF) - Sign up to the PROOF scheme thus telling us that you will only deal with us electronically. So we reject any paper filing which claims to come from you.
3. Monitor - Sign up to the Monitor scheme and then for added reassurance, you will receive an email every time your company details change on our records.
You can also use Monitor to keep an eye on any other companies you may nominate. There are many other advantages in doing business with us electronically: We send you an e-mail to confirm that your information has arrived– no more documents getting lost in the post.
We check your information on the screen when you type it in so no documents get sent back to you because you made a small mistake. We charge you a lot less to file electronically, because it costs us a lot less to work that way.
Further steps every business should take to protect their identity
Inform Staff and Check Identities - Always check the identity of your customers, both businesses and consumers. Credit reference agencies offer a wide range of solutions to authenticate and verify the identity of customers to ensure that they exist and are who they say they are.
Caution staff about the risk of giving out company information online or over the phone without first checking to whom they are giving the information to. As part of your security policy, you should implement guidelines on what personal information should be divulged to third parties, particularly by electronic means such as email.
Document Procedures - Having a well formulated document disposal policy in place, and adhering to it, is the first crucial step in protecting your business from corporation identity fraud.
Shredding information is the best way to dispose of documents securely and to ensure that criminals cannot gain access to data fraudulently. Cross cut shredders provide greater security by cutting paper into small confetti-like particles and also reduce bulk waste. Companies such as Fellowes offer powerful office shredders which can destroy large quantities of paper as well as CDs. (see ' Useful Links').
In support of this campaign, for the month of October Amazon.co.uk is kindly offering a 20% discount on shredders just use this code DIYE83EQ and send this link to your boss today!
Reduce the risk of electronic hijacking
Businesses must be responsible for ensuring that firewall and antivirus software is kept up-to-date. This way staff can securely open legitimate email attachments for viewing.
Another course a business could take to further protect their employees is setting up a VPN. (Virtual Private Networks)
This will enable you to give your employees remote access to office computers, a powerful business tool; but remain secure enough to avoid giving hackers a back door right into your network and employee or customer data.
Read about how to protect your employees and customers identities.