UK farmers lose single payments to fraudsters
However, the risk is likely to be lower in Ireland, where less information on who receives the single payment is made publicly available.
In the UK, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) publishes the full name and municipality or postal code of beneficiaries, and the amount of payment, with only beneficiaries who receive €1,250 or less anonymised.
This enables criminals to target specific individuals, which greatly improves their chances of success, according to the Financial Fraud Bureau, which protects the UK retail and card banking industries.
Fraudsters can easily find out where each individual payment goes, using a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) CAP internet search tool.
They can easily track down the farm phone number and convince people to part with their cash.
In the last two years, farmers across the UK have become victims of deception crimes, with sums lost ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands.
The scams used by fraudsters typically involve telephoning their victim and posing as their bank, the police, or another trusted organisation.
The criminal will claim that fraud has been detected on the farmer’s business or personal account, and that immediate action is required to remedy the situation.
The victim is then tricked into handing over key financial information or transferring funds into a so called ‘safe account’ (which is controlled by the criminal).
The RPA has responded by reminding UK farmers that their banks will never request their full online banking passwords, nor request a payment over the phone.
With beneficiaries in Ireland of only about 2% of farm subsidy spending made public, since 2011, there is less danger of this kind of fraud.
According to the farmsubsidy.org group, which promotes transparency, Ireland is one of four member states which has designed systems specifically to prevent access to farmer payment data.
France, Italy and the Netherlands are the others.
Up to 2010, details of payments to all Irish farmers were available on the Department of Agriculture’s website, by searching for specific recipients in specific locations.
However, this ended when the European Union Court of Justice ruled in November 2010 that the EU’s disclosure of payment data relating to ‘natural persons’ was a disproportionate violation of the right to personal privacy. In response, the European Commission ordered member states to stop publishing data, and in April 2011 issued an interim regulation requiring them to publish only data on payments to ‘legal persons’ (companies and partnerships). Now, only 375 ‘legal persons’ in Ireland, receiving about €80 million in 2010 are listed, by location.
