A new service has been set up to try to cut the impact of cyber-crime on island life, businesses and residents.

The Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance is launching the ’Suspicious Email Reporting Service’ today (Friday).

This service allows residents and businesses to forward any emails they consider to be suspicious to [email protected]

These emails will then be reviewed and will go on to form part of the intelligence used by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Crime Agency to disrupt criminal activity.

A similar service launched by the NCSC in April 2020 had received in excess of 2.3 million suspicious emails by August 31 and as a result more than 9,000 scams were disrupted and more than 22,000 websites associated to those emails were removed.

Chief Constable Gary Roberts welcomed the introduction of the new service and said: ’The SERS is a further step in combatting cyber-crime in the Isle of Man and protecting our residents and businesses from falling victim to malicious emails.

’The new service will add to the intelligence the UK government’s NCSC use to disrupt scam emails and take down criminal websites. On behalf of Isle of Man Constabulary and OCSIA, I would like to thank Manx Telecom for their collaboration in creating this service.’

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Iain Bell, security and data protection officer at Manx Telecom, added: ’Phishing and scam emails are a constant problem for everyone using online mail services, wherever they are in the world. This new initiative will allow OCSIA to understand how big a problem phishing is for Manx residents and, along with the work being undertaken by the NCSC, will help in the global effort to combat the effectiveness of phishing and online scams.’

A police statement said anyone who receives an email which they’re not quite sure about, should forward it to SERS.

It added: ’The message might be from a company you don’t normally receive communications from, or someone you do not know. You may just have a hunch. If you are suspicious, you should report it. Your report of a phishing email will help us to act quickly, protecting many more people from being affected.

’In a small number of cases, an email may not reach our service due to it already being widely recognised by spam detection services.’