How does the National Fraud Database work?

Members join CIFAS to prevent fraud and to stem fraud losses.

CIFAS membership is open to organisations that are able to identify fraud and are prepared to share fraud data with others through the CIFAS National Fraud Database and/or the Staff Fraud Database.  The membership also includes a number of Agencies that process CIFAS data.  Unfortunately, for data protection reasons, membership is not open to those who do not own their data, including intermediaries such as debt collection agencies, independent financial advisers, loss adjusters, tracing agents or private investigators.

Members are required to operate effective in-house procedures to enable fraud to be identified, prevented and shared.  Information on each identified fraud case is recorded on the CIFAS National Fraud Database.

When a Member searches the CIFAS National Fraud Database through one of a number of delivery methods (more information is available on request), the Member is made aware of a potential fraud by means of a flagged warning.  The warning will contain details of the matched case or cases.  The Member may then conduct an investigation. The flowchart below shows a typical working example of the database.

All the information recorded on the database can be useful to Member organisations at a number of stages during the customer lifecycle. The CIFAS National Fraud Database can be searched at the application stage, when an address change is requested, at the renewal stage or at any point during the relationship with the customer. To request more information from CIFAS please click here.

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