The debate about Soca rages on. The trail had gone a little cold, until a raft of stories came out this week on the back of a few comments made by director general Bill Hughes and Sharon Lemon, head of the e-Crime Unit, yesterday. They admitted it had been a struggle in the first year to assimilate all the disparate agencies comprising the organisation, and that Soca is still falling short of having a "long-term impact on organised crime", but hit back at accusations that it was not handling online crime effectively.

Yet a recent forum of retail fraud managers by 192.com Business Services has revealed these concerns are still very real. The forum was set up first last year as a means for fraud managers to share best practice and information on how to deal with attacks on their organisations, including presentations by the fuzz, MPs and even an ex-fraudster, who is now studying to be a lawyer (lots of transferable skills I suppose). Fraud managers can often be IT managers, depending on the organisation, as such a large part of the job involves dealing with phishing or screenscraping or other methods of online crime.

Again, according to 192's David Pope, a major gripe of fraud managers is that when they come to report fraud, the process is frustratingly slow and arduous. The will is clearly there to make an example out of these criminals and send a strong message, but it's not among the local police force's major concerns, and Soca's remit is organised, often globally organised, crime. According to Pope a lot of retailers lamented the NHTCU's priorites being realigned within Soca and there are even potential moves within the Met to set up a national e-crime coordination centre to bring together local forces. Other ideas to shore up this apparent hole in fraud reporting include a Home Office initiative of a National Fraud Reporting Centre…but we all know how long 'initiatives' take to set up.