![](https://emergencyservicestimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ESS-Button-resized.png")
The Police Foundation, in partnership with Virgin Media O2, is calling for the creation of a new fraud prevention agency as part of a suite of fundamental changes it says are needed to deal with a ‘fraud epidemic.’
Speaking at the launch of the report, ‘A victimless crime’? Why fraud policing needs a re-design, Andy Higgins interim Director of the Police Foundation said: “the policing response does not match the level of fraud we face.”
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 aer receiving too little by way of service.
from the Executive Summary.
Referring to the report’s findings Higgins said that in 2024, there were more than 4m victims of fraud, which is up 30 per cent year on year. With only 4,000 convictions, this high volume, geographically dispersed crime rarely leads to criminals facing time in jail.
The UK government’s National Fraud Strategy estimates that fraud costs UK society £6.8bn a year.
With a new national fraud strategy due later this year, this timely report is the result of interviews with 15 police leaders and a survey of 252 police officers and staff undertaken by YouGov during March and April.
One of the reasons why the authors say that fraud policing needs a redesign is a lack of specialist resource; just 0.64% of the police workforce are working as economic crime officers. While this type of crime is dealt with by general policing teams and not specialists, the number of specialist officers is increasing but not at pace to deal with what Higgins called. a “ubiquitous large volume crime type.”
Murray Mackenzie, Director of fraud for Virgin 02 joined the panel hosted at the company’s HQ in London and set out the scale of the problem of fraud for their customers.
“Fraudsters are operating at scale; they are relentless, vindictive and incredibly agile. They target hardware and customer data to carry out fraud. We have invested millions on protecting customers from the threat of incoming calls. In the last two years we have stopped 168m malicious text messages and we are flagging 50m suspicious calls per month.”
Murray Mackenzie, Director of fraud for Virgin 02.
The focus on prevention in the report’s eight recommendations is driven by a need to move the dial away from prosecutions – which are very low – because, as Higgins explained at the launch, “we are never going to investigate our way out of it.”
The report authors recommend the creation of a national Crime Prevention Agency complemented at a local level with a public health approach led by mayors and PCCs who would in turn develop local fraud prevention strategies.
Sharing data between agencies to understand vulnerability and repeat victims is all part of a data led approach recommended in this report. Luke Charters MP also joined the panel at the report launch, he expanded on this point. He said: “we need a national data fraud centre. There are too many cottage industries of smaller schemes, we need a cross sector national approach.”
The City of London Police is the national lead force for fraud. Responding to the publication of the report, Deputy Commissioner Nik Adams, National Coordinator 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.”
For more information on the report and its findings, read A ‘victimless crime’? Why fraud policing needs a re-design.
Read more – City of London Police welcomes new framework strengthening the fight against fraud.
