When did we simply accept fraud as an inevitable part of our modern lives?
Fraud is both everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere in that fraud has become part of daily life – Black Friday has historically seen cyber attacks soar by 275 per cent. And it is also nowhere in that, given the scale of the problem, astonishingly little is actually being done about it. Fraud has almost become par for the course: it is largely perceived to be an irritating and – providing you don’t fall for it – inconsequential crime.
But even if you don’t “fall for it”, the notion that fraud is simply a part of daily life is deeply problematic. This perception it is an invisible crime means it is consistently underestimated – a sentiment echoed by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services in 2019: “fraud does not bang, bleed or shout”.
And yet, it is the single largest category of crime in the UK according to the Office for National Statistics (41 per cent), as well as being under investigated and charged. There were 987,000 recorded offences of fraud in the years 2021 – 2022, and only a shocking 4,816 of those ended up with a charge – that’s a 0.4 per cent sentencing rate.
When you’re mugged, the only person responsible is the person that mugged you. It’s obvious, it’s physical and no part was played by the victim in enabling the mugger to take their bag. Whereas the equivalent with fraud is that the victim may not have asked the mugger to turn up, but when asked to, they opened their bag up for them to take all of their money.
While finding out how to ignore fraud is an important part of modern, tech driven lives, avoidance will never be as effective as prevention.
This is because firstly, fraud that involves victims being tricked into handing over their money is just one of many, many types of fraud. So assuming this “onus on the consumer” framework is not only misguided in principle, but also practice, as there’s not always an obvious “consumer”. This was evidenced in the recent discovery that the government was defrauded by about £6.7bn during the pandemic. Second, fraud is quickly growing in sophistication and avoiding it will soon no longer be as simple as ignoring a fraudulent text.
Third, fraud involves considerably more calculating techniques than many imagine. Before they even get to consumers they’ve already broken the law and pursued methods that are noticeably invasive. If you are a recipient of a fraudulent text or email, this is not just a fraudster simply trying their luck with every phone number they can find. Even relatively unsophisticated fraud requires fraudsters to circumvent telecoms companies, web hosting providers and tech platforms.
The progenitor of this meteoric rise of fraud? Technology. 80 per cent of reported frauds are cyber enabled, according to Action Fraud. Fraud has emerged to be one of many problems that has ballooned with the rapid digitisation across society, and the policy response has been mediocre at best. Tech not only increases the instances of fraud, but the complexity too.
The longer I work in policy, the more I think that the relationship between government commissioned reports and policy delivery is inversely proportional. Essentially, the more government reports there have been, the less policy has been delivered. Fraud is a glaring example of this. Since 2016, there have been at least eleven reports by committees and publicly funded organisations that focus on fraud in some way. And yet since 2016, the number of fraud offences has risen by over 50 per cent – from 605,949 to 936,276, according to the ONS.
The policy oversights are structural, regulatory and technical. The confusing labyrinth of organisations responsible for fraud has led to a responsibility vacuum in government. While there does need to be clearer accountability and more enforcement capacity, this can only get them so far: there also needs to be a better strategy to incentivise the plethora of private industries that enable fraud to act.
It should be impossible for policymakers to consider the future of safe societies without considering the gargantuan problem of fraud. It is another policy issue that due to the technological revolution, needs a fundamental rethink, not just organisational tinkering and reports.