Fraud is now the most common offence in the UK accounting for more than 40% of reported crime. In the year to July 2025, around 4.2 million people reported being defrauded in England and Wales.
Author
- Nicholas Ryder
Professor of Law, Cardiff University
Yet that's probably only a fraction of the true scale of the problem. The National Crime Agency estimates that around 86% of fraud goes unreported, meaning millions more are falling victim without ever coming forward.
The effect is enormous. In the UK alone, fraud is thought to cost the economy £219 billion a year. Globally, fraud losses are estimated at $5.1 trillion (£3.89 trillion), which is more than 80% of the UK's total gross domestic product.
Despite this, successive governments have failed to treat fraud with the urgency and seriousness it deserves. Over decades, policy responses have been fragmented, under-resourced and short-lived. The result is a system that's struggling to keep up with the scale and complexity of modern fraud.
Fraud takes many forms. It includes online scams, phishing emails, fake investment schemes, romance scams, identity theft and fraudulent messages pretending to be from banks or government departments. The common thread is deception for financial gain. Anyone can be a target.
Fraud also fuels wider harms. It enables organised crime, money laundering and even terrorist financing. And because so many scams take place online, often across borders, they are hard to trace and also hard to prosecute.
The UK's record on tackling fraud has been disjointed at best. Some of the foundations were laid in the 1980s with the Roskill report , which led to the creation of the Serious Fraud Office . But little political attention followed.
It wasn't until 2006 that the Fraud Act modernised the legal definition of fraud, making it easier to prosecute. But the law alone was not backed up by a serious long-term strategy. It would be another 13 years before fraud returned to the political agenda in a meaningful way.
In recent years, several government publications have attempted to address fraud. These included both economic crime plans , the Beating crime plan and the fraud strategy . The home affairs select committee has also investigated the issue, while fraud was added to the strategic policing requirement .
This means that police forces are required to treat the threat presented by fraud as a top priority. But these efforts have lacked coordination, consistency and staying power. Each new initiative has tended to start from scratch, often with unclear leadership and no follow-through.
A system unfit for purpose
Many fraud victims report their case to Action Fraud, the UK's national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime. But the service has been criticised as inadequate, difficult to use and slow to respond.
In 2023, the government released a new fraud strategy . It promised to reduce fraud by 10%, replace Action Fraud with a new reporting system, recruit 400 police officers to join a new national fraud squad, and collaborate more closely with tech firms and telecoms providers to tackle online scams.
Although they appeared to be positive steps, they wouldn't go far enough. One think tank, the Social Market Foundation, estimated that tackling economic crime effectively would require 30,000 officers and £3.5 billion per year.
Much of the government's fraud policy also relies on voluntary agreements with tech and telecoms companies, such as the online fraud charter and certain provisions in the Online Safety Act 2023 . But voluntary measures are no match for the scale of the threat.
Why has so little been done?
There are political reasons why fraud has not been treated as a priority. For one, it lacks visibility. Unlike violent crime, fraud rarely makes headlines. And many fraud victims blame themselves. Tackling fraud also means taking on powerful industries, from social media platforms to banks, which successive governments have often been reluctant to do.
Short-termism in politics hasn't helped either. Since 1986, the Home Office has had 20 different home secretaries, each with limited time to make a difference and many other competing priorities. This constant churn has made it hard to sustain any long-term plan.
Even the current government's "Plan for Change" - published in December 2024 and an important policy roadmap - made no mention of fraud at all. That silence speaks volumes.
Fraud has changed considerably over the past few decades. It's become faster, more global , more digital and more professional. But the UK's systems are still stuck in the past.
A serious national response should include:
- a properly funded and well-staffed fraud reporting and enforcement system
- mandatory data-sharing between telecoms, banks and law enforcement
- robust public education campaigns to raise awareness and resilience
- a long-term plan that treats fraud not as an afterthought but as a national economic and security threat.
Some recent policies have made progress. There are new powers to gather information, better support for police and efforts to improve how the public can report scams. But these are not yet enough to close the gap between the scale of the threat and the ability of the authorities to respond to it.
Fraud is costing lives, livelihoods and public trust. Unless it is taken seriously - with the funding, leadership and coordination it demands - that cost will only continue to rise.
Nicholas Ryder receives funding from UKRI, the Joffe Trust and StopScams.
