The War on Fraud: How the UK can Step Up to the 21st Century Crime Wave

After a long period of complacency, it would appear that the world is finally waking up to the global crime wave which has steadily been growing unchecked for the past decade; according to research by the Global Anti Scam Alliance (GASA), in 2024 fraud against consumers alone (thus excluding frauds against businesses and the public sector) exceeded $1 trillion.

As an affluent, digitally enabled, English-speaking nation, the UK has been disproportionately exposed to this global crime wave – a threat which show no signs of abating. In April, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), noted that fraud had reached unprecedented levels in 2024 with an estimated 4.1 million incidents in England and Wales.

These statistics put paid to the previous government’s suggestion that their Fraud Strategy, launched in 2023 had been taking the fight back to the fraudsters. Indeed, the current government appear to recognise this with the UK government’s first ever Fraud Minister, Lord Hanson, announcing the intention to launch a new Fraud Strategy later this year at the recent Global Anti Scam Summit in London.

However, with evident constraints on UK public finances, how might the new strategy achieve the elusive ‘do more with less’ to which we’ve become accustomed in UK government criminal justice policy making?

Make Do and Prevent

A problem of this scale, it is accepted, far outstrips the capacity of even the best funded policing response acting alone. A future Fraud Strategy must therefore adopt a ‘prevent first’ mentality to reduce the volume. It can only do this by more fully harnessing the capabilities of the (better resourced) private sector to disrupt the access of fraudsters to the financial and communications tools necessary to access victims. Within proper legal and procedural guardrails, arming the private sector with the data and intelligence they need to scale disruptive prevention is, arguably, their only option.

However, prevention alone cannot turn the tide. An active and visible policing deterrent is an essential component of the future response. This should be reserved for more targeted and ‘surgical’ operations against the enablers of mass-scale fraud; the criminal marketplaces offering ‘fraud as a service’ capabilities to organised fraud groups. Recent high-profile policing operations such as Operation Elaborate, which took down the notorious iSpoof portal, provide a blueprint for this ‘online and upstream’ approach and should be the model adopted going forward.

However, policing the threat in this way, as the author has previously argued, is not simply a case of throwing more funding at policing to do more of the same (though more funding is essential). The Fraud Strategy should also stabilise the policing landscape, ending the decade-long debates around respective roles within the system, adopt a multi-year funding model for fraud policing and properly plan for the cyber, data and financial investigative workforce of the future.

Finally, the strategy must deal with the outsized elephant in the room once and for all - the role of the social media and ‘Big Tech’ firms in the response to fraud. With a reported two-thirds of consumer scams originating online, a prevent-driven approach can only succeed if the tech behemoths decide to participate in fraud prevention in earnest.

The previous government’s voluntary approach to engaging these sectors has failed to create the incentives for these sectors to meaningfully engage beyond piecemeal and performative projects. Given the shift in US government relations with the sector, this is unlikely to change. While the UK government’s previously robust stance on the issue has seemingly abated since the US inauguration, the government is under considerable pressure from the financial industry to put forward a reasonable ask of the sector in the strategy.

It Takes a Network to Fight a Network – the Global Response

Getting some of these fundamentals right at a national level should of course be the priority of the UK’s future Fraud Strategy; the estimated £219bn cost of fraud to the UK needs to be an economic policy priority given the sizeable impact on UK business investment and, by extension, UK prosperity. However, it is recognised that taking purely parochial action against a global threat will have limited long-term effect; it is estimated by the City of London Police (the UK’s lead police force for fraud) that 75% of the UK fraud threat has an overseas element. It is therefore imperative that the strategy faces into this fact.

First, the UK, when seeking allies in the war on fraud, should look east and not west; with the US in retreat on financial crime matters, partners in the Asia-Pacific region – hit particularly hard by this threat – are in the ascendant on global fraud responses. While some of the proposed responses in the region (such as the introduction of caning for scammers in Singapore) would not be appropriate for the UK’s legal and political context, the UK can take learnings from our commonwealth partners in the region, including Australia. The Australian Anti-Scam Centre and its systematic connectivity with the private sector under the Anti-Scam Loop, as well as its more muscular stance on the role of Big Tech and Social media companies seems to be paying off with a reported 20% drop in scams last year.

However, bi-lateral partnerships are one thing. The real problem policymakers need to grapple with is the lack of international architecture to enable global cooperation on fraud prevention. This is where the UK has a chance to build a ‘coalition of the willing’ with key partners to drive a new global approach. Whether this sits within existing architecture, such as the Financial Action Taskforce, under the United Nations’ Convention on Transnational Organised Crime, the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention on Cybercrime or an entirely new mechanism requires careful consideration. What is clear, however, is that the global fraud vacuum must be filled before the threat spirals even further out of control.

In summary, fraud is, without doubt, the global crime threat of the 21st century, yet the UK (and global) response has failed to scale accordingly. The latest ONS fraud stats make this even harder to ignore as a policy priority both in the criminal justice and economic security spheres. Against this backdrop, the Fraud Strategy should be seen as an opportunity for the UK to adopt a new ‘prevent-first’ mentality, to adopt a public-private operational response in practice rather than theory and take the reins around the international response to put this threat in abeyance.

© RUSI, 2025.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

For terms of use, see Website Terms and Conditions of Use.

Have an idea for a Commentary you'd like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we'll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. View full guidelines for contributors.