Kathryn Westmore

While the overall level of economic crime associated with cryptocurrency and digital assets appears to remain a relatively small proportion of overall activity, their potential use by criminals, whether to evade sanctions, launder the proceeds from organised crime, commit large-scale fraud or, support terrorist groups, requires that regulators and authorities put in place robust appropriate safeguards.

This new fraud strategy has been in the works for a while, recognising the huge amount of increase that there has been in fraud in the UK. It was already a big issue prior to the pandemic, but what we saw during COVID was that fraud really accelerated. That includes fraud associated with pandemic release schemes, the increase internal fraud risks with businesses moving to hybrid working and the fact that al; of us moved our lives online which gave criminals huge opportunities to scam us.

Kathryn Westmore, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, warned that this "doesn't mean that the SRA is suddenly going to be issuing multimillion-pound blockbuster fines." "But it is something that supervisors are in favour of because it gives them more flexibility, particularly in bigger cases to be able to apply a fine with a rigorous methodology behind it to what is proportionate, "Westmore, a senior research fellow at RUSI's Centre for Financial Crime and Security, said.