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If you have been defrauded, who do you report the crime to? Even police admit it’s confusing, speaking to the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee in March. Do you approach the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, or the National Crime Agency, that has a National Economic Crime Command.
Report Fraud is the central reporting place, newly relaunched from the unloved Action Fraud. All too often the outcome is ‘NFA’ – no further action. London seems to have disproportionately much of the UK’s fraud – the Met receives 40 per cent of demand from Report Fraud; and the police estimate that 60 per cent of courier fraud victims are in London or the wider region.
Besides police, Rory Innes, Chief Executive and Founder, The Cyber Helpline, gave evidence to the Assembly members. He said: “Criminals are better at marketing than they are at technology. They understand what is going to make you believe them, what is going to make you click, what is going to make you do something that enables that crime. The thousands and thousands of people that we have helped in London, the criminals probably had a phone, a social media account, and an email account, and that is enough. That is causing devastating impacts including loss of life, loss of finances, mental health.”
Helpline
His charity estimates that only 36 per cent of those who fall victim to cyber crime will report to the police. The helpline has been operating across London for 18 months; among its work, largely by volunteers, is help to people who have been victims of cyber crime, such as tricked into sharing of sexual images and then blackmailed (sextortion), or tricked into being a money mule, and moving money for a criminal as part of catfishing.
Priorities
Romance fraud, courier fraud, which is sometimes also known as police impersonation or banking staff impersonation fraud, investment fraud, abuse of position fraud, payment diversion, and card and payment fraud are the six ‘priority fraud types’ for the Metropolitan Police, according to Will Lyne, Head of Economic and Cybercrime, at the Met. In a ‘pan-London proactive economic crime team’, the Met and the City of London work together; that team formed at the start of 2026 is focusing on those six priorities. Lyne described AI as a tool, ‘that optimises and enhances and increases the scale and sophistication of different steps within the fraud business model that these criminals are undertaking. Lots of frauds that involve access to victim machines, access to victim computers, for example, AI and some AI tooling that is really quite freely available and cheap for criminals to rent really enables you to operate at a much greater scale’, than when such fraudsters spoke to their victims over the phone, or typed emails.
‘Numbers game’
Meanwhile Det Chief Supt Oliver Little, Lead Force Operations Room National Coordination, at the City of London Police, the force that leads nationally on countering fraud, spoke of an acceleration of the number of people using more and more technology to enable fraud, ‘because it enables people to attack a much wider number of people at once and they can play a numbers game’. Talking of numbers, the Met has around 100 people working in the cybercrime unit and around 300 working in economic crime. Fraud (‘economic crime’ is a more formal term) is the largest volume crime, yet the Met has some 33,000 officers; although the Met says that its economic crime ‘headcount’ will be increasing in the next year. Meanwhile, as police acknowledge, judgment and shame are barriers to reporting (and prospects of recovering money defrauded). To sum up, much good work is going on by the authorities, such as the Home Office Stop! Think Fraud campaign, ‘but it is still very siloed’, one police speaker told the committee.
Issues
Among the issues: if few victims of cyber crime and frauds get a ‘positive outcome’ – a criminal punished, their money back – or are left with ‘NFA’, it’s understandable if the non-cyber specialist does not even know the sort of crime they have suffered – and nor are police necessarily expert. Besides, a crime could be a hybrid (is someone befriended and scammed by an overseas call centre into sending crypto currency, supposedly to a lover, a victim of crypto crime, or romance fraud?). And as Lyne noted, ‘a really significant chunk of these offenders that do not reside in the UK and criminal justice outcomes are not practical or proportionate’.
For more visit the London.gov.uk website.
