Data analytics firms that track workers in the U.K. financial services industry are saying that, as more people work from home, complaints of harassment, including racist and sexist language, have been on the rise, according to the London-based Financial News.

One, Behavox, said that since March there has been an 18 percent increase in complaints about the behavior of other users on the platform that is not congruent with a professional working environment. Another, SteelEye, said something similar, having seen what it called a spike in complaints regarding language that could be deemed as harassment.

These companies attribute the rise in complaints to more people working from home. Offices are public spaces where employees are subject to a lot more scrutiny, and so even egregious harassers many times understand the need to be discrete, hiding words and behavior behind closed doors or saving them for when there's only a few people around. However, as growing numbers work from home, these people have become more brazen. Behavox's chief executive said that some workers are forming cliques, or buddy networks, and so they have grown more comfortable letting loose with actions that normally wouldn't stand scrutiny. This is especially the case in times when workers migrate off the official communication channels and confer over, say, WhatsApp or some other platform.

One might also consider a mindset change when one is at home, where people generally are more casual than at the office, and so less hesitant about saying or doing things they might not have done before.

Beyond harassment, these analytics companies have also detected an uptick in theft and fraud attempts, with one company saying that its system raised alarms about a possible theft of intellectual property that eventually turned into a compliance inquiry. There is a belief that, since the pandemic has paralyzed much of society, regulators are asleep at the wheel, which has prompted a larger number of finance workers to try their hand at malicious behavior.