Fraud victims let down by outdated 1960s policing structure, report finds

Glasgow Times

22-05-2025

Think tank the Police Foundation has called for a major overhaul of how law enforcement deals with fraud, which makes up around 40% of total crime in Britain.
In the year to December 2024, there were an estimated 4.1 million incidents of fraud, up a third on the previous year, according to the annual Crime Survey for England and Wales.
There were more than four million incidents of fraud in the year to December 2024, according to the annual Crime Survey for England and Wales (Gareth Fuller/PA)
The Police Foundation report, published on Thursday, made a series of recommendations including setting up a UK Crime Prevention Agency and a national policing body to deal with fraud.
The issue should be dealt with at a UK level alongside terrorism and serious and organised crime including economic and cyber offences, it said.
It also called upon regional mayors and police and crime commissioners to take a so-called public health approach to fraud, raising awareness about how to avoid being scammed.
The report concluded: 'Fraud has become the single biggest form of crime affecting people in the UK and yet our policing institutions have not caught up with the scale of that change.
'We have a 1960s local policing structure trying to fight a 21st century cyber-enabled cross-border crime.
'As a result the police are achieving limited success and victims are receiving too little by way of service.'
While the report found that a lot of prevention work needs to be done outside policing, it also called for reform of how the police deal with fraud by 2030.
Michael Skidmore, head of serious crime research at the Police Foundation, said: 'Fraud is a high-volume, harmful crime, often perpetrated online by sophisticated networks that operate across police force and international borders.
'In comparison, our policing response is under-resourced, under-skilled and locked into a reactive, geographically bounded policing model developed to tackle the local crime problems of the 1960s.
'We are calling for a wholesale shift to a prevention-focused response.
'We need a new national lead body with a ringfenced budget and local and regional tasking powers, greater private sector collaboration and an uplift in skills.
'The current model is simply unsustainable, given the scale, harm and sophistication of the fraud challenge we face today.'
The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that around 14% of fraud is reported to police or the centralised Action Fraud service.
A total of 1,214,639 fraud reports were made to police in the year to March 2024, of which 3,641 ended with someone being charged with a crime.
Research by report sponsor Virgin Media O2 using freedom of information requests suggested that only 6% of reports to Action Fraud were passed to police forces for investigation in 2023/24.
Three of the forces in England and Wales had no officers dedicated to investigating fraud, the telecoms giant found.
The report also said that in March 2021 there were 866 economic crime officers in English and Welsh police forces, equal to 0.64% of the total workforce when fraud is 40% of crime.
Murray Mackenzie, director of fraud prevention at Virgin Media O2, said the company had blocked fraudulent transactions worth more than £250 million in one year.
He added: 'With overall fraud prosecutions falling despite a 33% jump in cases last year, the UK is failing to effectively tackle fraud, and criminals are stealing with no real prospect of ever facing justice.'
The report said that of 252 police officers and staff surveyed by YouGov between March 31 and April 4, 88% disagreed that police have enough resources to tackle fraud.
When the author asked one unnamed senior officer what the National Fraud Squad is, a scheme set up by the previous government, they laughed, the report said.
A series of recommendations in the report also includes a call for the private sector to be pushed to share data that could prevent fraud with the police.
Deputy Commissioner Nik Adams, national co-ordinator for economic and cyber crime for the City of London Police, said: 'The response to fraud has been improving.
'It is not about a badly designed system; it is about sustainably resourcing and strengthening the response to keep pace with this constantly evolving threat.
'To accelerate further fraud reductions, the wider system, especially the tech sector, need to make online platforms much more hostile to criminals.'
He said that City of London Police is 'leading a national economic crime strategy to increase fraud investigators and the use of financial investigation to seize assets, including crypto currency, from criminals using specialist investigation and policing powers.'
Its officers are also working with watchdog His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services to make sure local forces understand what they need to do to tackle fraud, he added.