The Police Foundation, the UK independent policing think tank, has warned that the country’s response to fraud is currently inadequate, calling for a major redesign of how police forces tackle the rapidly growing threat.
In a report published in partnership with Virgin Media O2 on Wednesday, the Foundation highlights what it describes as a severe mismatch between the scale of fraud-related crimes and the resources dedicated to combating them, with the organisation proposing radical reforms.
Launching the report at an event attended by National Technology News in central London on Wednesday, Andy Higgins, research director at the Police Foundation, emphasised the mismatch between the prevalence of fraud and current policing strategies and the need for a redesign of the current fraud.
Higgins stressed the report’s recommendations, including the creation of a new national crime prevention agency, a new data centre for better data sharing, and a redefinition of the roles of local and regional police in fraud policing.
“Quite simply, the policing response does not match the scale and level of threat we face,” he said.
The move comes ahead of the government’s new expanded fraud strategy, announced by fraud minister Lord Hanson in March and expected later this year as part of the “Plan for Change”.
The Foundation’s report highlights fraud currently makes up 43 per cent of all reported crime in the UK and is increasing by 33 per cent year-on-year.
In 2024 alone, 3.9 million people fell victims of fraud, with an estimated economic impact of £6.8 billion.
He also called for more focus on prevention.
“Right across the workforce, there is too much focus on arrests and prosecutions, including within government performance metrics,” he explained.
While fraud is a widespread, often cyber-enabled crime, only 3.5 per cent of the 4.1 million annual frauds are investigated, and only 1,000 offenders receive prison sentences, the report says.
Key issues that impede the tackling of the issue include police resource allocation, with only 0.64 per cent of police officers dedicated to economic crime.
The study also highlights a skills deficit in policing, with 81 per cent of the police workforce surveyed agreed that fraud requires a specialist skill set, with 51 per cent admitting that police officers do not have the skills to investigate fraud.
Meanwhile, 70 per cent of fraud originates overseas, making enforcement complex and often ineffective.
“Fraud is largely a distance crime, while the operational response is predominantly local,” Higgins said.
The report calls for the government to create a new national crime prevention agency charged with taking the national and international action necessary to prevent fraud and cybercrime.
“We need a single national body to lead and coordinate the fraud response that will need strong private sector relationships, and crucially, it needs tasking powers in relation to regional and local fraud investigation teams,” Higgins said.
Michael Skidmore, head of serious crime research at The Police Foundation, echoed the sentiment in a statement released on Thursday.
“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,” he said. “The current model is simply unsustainable, given the scale, harm and sophistication of the fraud challenge we face today.”
The survey also prioritised data sharing particularly from the private sector, highlighting the need to establish a new national anti-fraud data centre and legally require private companies to share relevant data.
“There’s a lot of data, but insufficient insight,” Higgins said. “Progress is being made at bringing private and public sector data together through initiatives like the joint fraud Task Force and the new online Crime Control Center, but there are still barriers and sensitivities to data sharing, particularly related to inter sector data sharing,.”
Murray McKenzie, director of fraud at Virgin Media, discussed the scale and challenges of fraud prevention, emphasising the telco’s efforts to tackle the issue.
“Last year alone, we prevented £200 million in fraudulent hardware transactions and blocked 116 million malicious texts,” he said. “But this is a shared fight, we need a centralised body for fraud prevention and cross-sector collaboration.”
Luke Chalmers, Labour MP for York Outer, criticised what he described as an inefficient structure for how fraud is investigated and resourced across different levels of law enforcement.
“The current system doesn’t effectively distribute resources or coordinate efforts to combat fraud, creating gaps and inefficiencies in how fraud is investigated and prevented,” he said.
Citing the report, he added: “Fraud, economic crime, and cybercrime collectively account for 50 per cent of all crime in Britain, yet these areas receive less than one per cent of police resources.”
He emphasised the government’s role to address the imbalance.
“I don’t want a Labor government to have a legacy where fraud and those stats are increasing from when we took office,” he said.
Commenting on the need for data sharing across different sectors, he said: “This government has the passion and the ambition to tackle fraud once and for all and I’m committed to finding ways to better support victims, including through pushing for the creation of an evidence-based national anti-fraud data centre.”
The review was based on research from recent academic papers, interviews with 15 senior police officers and a survey of 252 police officers and staff undertaken between 31st of March and 4th April 2025.
The key priorities of Lord Hanson’s strategy will focus on combating technology-enabled fraud, including emerging frauds such as AI, and the minister said that controlling these threats will be at the heart of the new strategy.
In March, the government announced a new Global Fraud Summit to be held in early 2026 to develop a new, expanded fraud strategy with international cooperation at its core, as part of the government’s Plan for Change.
The summit will be hosted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and INTERPOL in Vienna in early 2026 and will bring together dozens of governments from across the world to transform the global response to fraud.
