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Civilian volunteers will be recruited to help solve cybercrimes in the UK, home secretary Theresa May has said.

Unpaid volunteers and "cyber-specials" will be given police-like powers and allowed to help investigations into cybercrimes, May said. The idea forms part of wider police reforms proposed by the government.


May said police forces, which have been on the end of massive budget cuts by the Home Office, needed to utilise more volunteers and take on those with particular skill sets. "We want to encourage those with skills in particular demand, such as those with specialist IT or accountancy skills, to work alongside police officers to investigate cyber or financial crime, and help officers and staff fight crime more widely," she said.

In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. Granting extra powers to #police volunteers is a very good idea. Will help @SuffolkPolice tackle new forms of crime such as cyber and fraud — Tim Passmore #StickWithItSuffolk (@TimSPCC) January 20, 2016

The plans were initially announced in a consultation by the government last year but still lack specific details on how volunteers investigating cybercrimes would work with police. Critics of the scheme have expressed concern about how much access volunteers will have to police data, systems, and processes.

The UK currently has a number of police forces and departments with responsibility for investigating cybercrimes. The Metropolitan Police is responsible for looking at cybercrime, online fraud, computer hacking and denial of service attacks; Action Fraud, part of the City of London police, investigates fraud and online crimes; and the National Crime Agency co-ordinates the national response "to the most serious of cybercrime threats". Security agencies such as MI5 also play some part in investigating serious cyber issues.

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Despite the multiple departments, and call for volunteers, an investigation by The Times found that there were only 9,000 convictions from 3.2 million complaints of fraud and cyber-fraud taking place.

In 2015 cybercrime stats were included in the official crime statistics for the first time. Including the whole new type of crime in the figures for the first time saw an inevitable rise in the total crime levels in the UK, the digital crimes saw overall crime rise 107%.

In total there were an estimated 5.1 million cybercrimes and frauds during 2014 and 2.5 million offences under the Computer Misuse Act, which includes hacking, identity theft and malware incidents. In total, 14.1 million criminal offences were recorded in the UK throughout 2014.