This week’s COVID briefing paper (COVIDbriefing-22.pdf) resumes the Cybercrime Centre’s COVID briefing series, which began in July 2020 with the aim of sharing short on-going updates on the impacts of the pandemic on cybercrime.

The reason for restarting this series is a recent personal experience while navigating through the government’s requirements on COVID-19 testing for international travel. I observed great variation in the quality of website design and cannot help but put on my academic hat to report on what I found.

The quality of some websites is so poor that it hard to distinguish them from fraudulent sites — that is they have many of the features and characteristics that consumers have been warned to pay attention to. Compounded with the requirement to provide personally identifiable information there is a risk that fraudulent sites will indeed spring up and it will be unsurprising if consumers are fooled.

The government needs to set out minimum standards for the websites of firms that they approve to provide COVID-19 testing — especially with the imminent growth in demand that will come as the UK’s travel rules are eased.