I'm back... great holiday, thanks, and I really hope you found something to interest you in the interview series I published while I was away. Nor is there any reason to save interviews for holidays, so if there's somebody in particular you'd be interested in seeing featured in a Q&A, do email me and I'll see what I can do.

Back to the business in hand, and it seems as if mortgage fraud is both the old black and the new black for 2010. KPMG Forensic's Fraud Barometer shows £96m of mortgage fraud, so far, in 2010, compared to a total of £77m in the whole of 2009. Okay... lending was at a low in 2009, so there wasn't much of an opportunity, and one single case, worth £50m, is part of the 2010 figure, but before you go dismissing the data, how about the fact that there've been 166 cases of serious mortgage fraud in the first half of 2010, the highest six-month figure in the Barometer's 22-year history. And go here to read a spokesperson for KPMG explain why he thinks the only way is up.

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