Southeast London is Britain’s online fraud hotspot

Southeast London has the densest concentration of fraudulent card activity in the UK, according to research.

Woolwich, Plumstead and Thamesmead in particular are especially bad, according to card fraud screening company The 3rd Man, which monitors around a fifth of all card transactions in the UK.

In the Southeast London postcode areas, there were 66,000 "bad" transactions out of the one million transactions looked at, with a fraudulent value of more than 18 million.

In total, the research analysed 85 million "good" and "bad" transactions over the past 12 months, with bad transactions adding up to a value of more than 85 million.

Andrew Goodwill, director at The 3rd man, explained to IT PRO that it gathered the data from individual retailers including Argos, Halfords and Ticketmaster.

He said: "If you were to go an retailer's website and bought something, all the information you put into the payment page, our customers send us that data and we do some forensic analysis."

"We then go back with our results, and by doing so we in effect screen for fraudulent transactions," he added.