Among the various agencies subsumed into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), launched by Tony Blair today as Britain's answer to the FBI, is the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, created five years ago to tackle the scourge of cyber-crime.

Set up after a Home Office review that identified significant gaps in the ability of existing law-enforcement bodies to fight online crime, the NHTCU was the first national agency to target a specific area of crime. From its offices in East London it tracked and tackled crimes such as software piracy, hacking attacks, credit card fraud, child pornography and identity theft.

But internet security experts are concerned that the decision to bundle the NHTCU and its parent body, the National Crime Squad, into the new Soca means that the only national organisation focused on one of the fastest growing areas of crime, which costs British businesses £2.5 billion a year, has itself lost its identity.

If you visit the NHTCU website, once a repository of information and advice on different types of cyber-crime, you will now just see a single page announcing that the organisation no longer exists.

"The National Hi Tech Crime Unit has now become part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. As a result the NHTCU is no longer providing individual responses to enquiries either via this web site or direct email contacts," the message states.

"If you are a member of the public wishing to report a crime or criminal attempt, please contact your local police force within your country of residence."

Although there is a large Soca logo on the page, there is not even a link to the Soca website at www.soca.gov.uk. Not that the Soca website is much help anyway: it consists of just a few pages with general information about the agency's priorities - drug-dealers and people-traffickers - and has no contact details except for a PO box address. There is not even a contact e-mail.

According to Richard Starnes, president of the the British branch of the Internet Security Systems Association, a trade association which has 600 members in the UK, the decision to merge the NHTCU into Soca risks compromising five years of hard work by the unit, which has wide and valuable contacts with both industry and local constabularies.

"It seems like the United Kingdom has taken a giant step forward in tackling organised crime with the creation of Soca and a gigantic step backwards in dealing with cybercrime with the amalgamation of the NHTCU into Soca," Mr Starnes told Times Online.

The concern in the online security industry is that with the NHTCU now part of the larger organisation, the focus will be on organised, high-tech crime, while smaller-scale but damaging offences — for instance, individuals hacking into company's servers or writing malicious viruses — will be left to local police forces ill-equipped to deal with them.

Mr Starnes said he feared that much of the NHTCU's expertise and experience, and its contacts both with local police forces and with business, would be lost.

"If I walked into my local police station and said I wanted to report a computer crime, the desk sergeant is probably going to give me a blank scare," he added. "Reporting computer crime has been an issue for some time but this only makes the situation worse."

A Soca spokeswoman said that the NHTCU's 100 or so employees were now employed by Soca, that they had remained in the same offices, and there should be no disruption to the service that it provides. "It's not really going to change anything at all. It's business as usual," she said.

But sources from within the old NHTCU admitted that morale was low in the unit, which has spent five years establishing itself as the main focal point for cyber-crime, and there was a feeling that the Government, in creating the new agency, had thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Mr Starnes said: "We're worried that the focus within Soca will be exclusively on organised crime rather than crime committed through high-tech means. Not high-tech crime is organised, a lot of it is simply individuals hacking into systems or creating their own viruses."

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