Top e-crime officers have moved to reassure business leader that the much-criticised online fraud reporting channels are improving. Nevertheless, they warned much work is needed to improve the police response to internet crime.

Speaking to exclusively to IT Week, Sharon Lemon, head of e-crime at the Serious Organised Crime Agency, said the major threats facing large organisations lie in the processing and storage of customer account details. She promised the new government-backed National Fraud Reporting Centre will go some way to correcting the current "muddle" in fraud reporting.

Lemon argued that the fast-moving and flexible approach of the criminal gangs means traditional policing strategies are often too unresponsive to combat the ever-changing nature of e-crime threats.

"Prevention and detection is one aspect [of e-crime policing] but traditional prosecutions take a great deal of time – by the time you get them to court there are no lessons to learn," she explained. "The criminals move so quickly, a working group approach to this will be no good."

She also explained that Soca has spent the last year "building up an intelligence picture about how the criminals operate", and is coordinating its efforts with other agencies to take on any relevant big cases from the fraud reporting centre.

Charlie McMurdie, head of e-crime at the Metropolitan Police, argued that despite "significant work being carried out in the last couple of years" by Soca and other agencies, there is "still a lot to be done" to improve the police response to e-crime.

She repeated her backing for a proposed centralised police e-crime unit, charged with similar responsibilities as the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), which was subsumed into Soca. "There are numerous forums providing expertise and advice and reporting centres, but there's not a joined-up cohesive point where you can go if you have a particular [e-crime] problem," she argued. "We've acknowledged that law enforcement can't deal with the problem in isolation."

But Soca's Lemon said that the setting up of such a unit would not be a silver bullet. "It's not just as simple as that – we have to look at ways to find the gaps [in policing] and look at ways to fill them," she argued. "People said that when the NHTCU was moved into Soca there was a perceived loss but I've never established that."

To this end, a National E-crime Strategy Group was recently set up to co-ordinate the activities of law enforcement agencies in the space, find and plugging gaps in knowledge, share information and ensure efforts aren't duplicated, she explained.

Mike Maddison, head of security and privacy services at consultancy Deloitte, said the prospect of a "national e-crime capability" is getting a positive response from private industry. "I'm sure Soca is doing great work but with the demise of the NHTCU there was a general feeling in the commercial world that they'd lost a visible go-to place," he added.