Fraud now accounts for 40 per cent of recorded offenses in Britain.
….
It is now the most common crime in the UK, accounting for 40 per cent of all offences recorded in England and Wales. Overall, it is estimated to cost the UK more than £200 billion a year.Fraud against individuals is split between “unauthorised” fraud, for example when a person’s bank details are stolen, and “authorised push payment” cases, where someone is convinced to hand over their money, for example to buy fake goods.
In terms of volume around 90 per cent is unauthorised fraud, according to figures from industry body UK Finance. But by value it is split more evenly – 58 per cent for card frauds compared to 42 per cent for the scams, 80 per cent of which start online.
There’s got to be an artefact in this being 40% pf all offences recorded.
Is there a greater propensity to report? To record?
For I simply don’t believe there’s near no burglary etc any more.
“Fraud against individuals” is the interesting part where someone sliced the data to tell this story.
Covid fraud, grant fraud, subsidies, benefits, child-care support, pensions all count as not in the fraud against individuals category presumably.
“They care about how many people they can get money out of because they need to fund something else, which could be terrorism, the drugs trade, human trafficking and other major types of offences.”
This type of statement always bemuses me. Are we to believe that the drugs trade and human trafficking/prostitution are such loss making business ventures that they need to pump cash in from elsewhere to keep them afloat?
In terms of volume around 90 per cent is unauthorised fraud
So 10% is authorised fraud ?
Of course there’s an artifact….
It’s extremely easy to report scams, since they often start with social media/email, and all decent providers have spam filters and reporting/block options.
There’s a fvckton of attemtps, often automated, and only the most gullible of idorts fall for them.
Then there’s the dodgy sellers on the various market plazas, if the plaza’s themselves aren’t dodgy to begin with, etc.
But it’s all (attempted) fraud in some way. So the base number is pretty high, after which Journalistic Statisticking is applied.
But it’s all spray-and-pray to catch that 0.01% of people that fall for it, whereas other, quite physical, offenses need to be more targeted and specific to be effective, often more time-consuming and risky as well if you even want to stand a chance to get away with it.
Probably quite underreported as well, since it’s a damn hassle to report stuff to the Plod if any attempt fails. Either not worth the bother, or some quite personal percussive re-education is applied to the inept.
Your house simply isn’t the target of 20-40 attempted burglaries a day.
Or rather, it is, but most, if not all, of those attempts aren’t physical, and just scouting to see if Idiot mcIdiotface lives there.
And whatever isn’t caught by spam filters is only a click of a button away to report and block.
The bias here is in them using raw reported numbers for the electronic attacks/offences, versus the officially reported physical offences.
With predictable results….
First law of report reading; look at who’s compiling it. In this case I think it’s most likely Plod. Investigating burglaries could be dangerous and certainly will be difficult. It also requires 147 forms to be completed. You meet a nicer class of person committing fraud. Usually, you just sit at a desk working the computer. Also it only needs 146 forms…
It looks like recorded is doing some heavy lifting in order to give the story some heft and maybe attract clicks 😉
It is an important story* and judging by the spam I get there’s a lot of attempts at fraud, or at least finding people susceptible to that type of fraud. The numbers of those falling for it must be increasing as the population ages and more people become vulnerable.
*They’ve done the Guardian trick of giving us one horrendous example and tried to imply its the norm.
Burglaries might not be investigated, but they must be recorded, as you need a crime number for insurance purposes.
Re: attempted fraud. I have 76 emails in my personal email spam folder, 90% of which are attempted fraud…
“Fraud now accounts for 40 per cent of recorded offenses in Britain.”
Shouldn’t it be “offences”?
Anyway, assume that “recorded” is doing some sort of lifting (and the CSEW only started tracking fraud and computer misuse in 2015), then fraud accounts for 3.3 million (-ish) with speeding, FPNs issued, at about 2.4 million.
Probably a reasonably OK number, as far as it goes.
I agree with Ducky.
If’s offensive when “offense” is used in British English. It debases the unique color of our language.
Fvcking teenage scribblers.
It might be 40% by value, because you don’t need to steal many bank accounts for it to add up to a fair amount of money.
I’d question whether it excludes attempted fraud where transactions were processed but subsequently reversed without loss?
I had an example of this in 2022, where the day started with some weird transaction for £1 and then escalated to purchases of Google cards and eventually generators. Fortunately the generators were far in excess of my daily withdrawal / payments alert so I contact the bank and all the transactions (up to several thousand at that point) were cancelled/reversed and new cards issued.
By the time I was chasing Santander, they were also chasing me to confirm whether these transactions were mine or not, so their automated fraud detection would probably have worked as well.
What about the hate crimes? There were six thousand a day by just one bloke in Scotland, apparently. Multiply that up…
Yeah, but he got a pass because “You can’t be racist against white people” (apparently) and also used both his “I’m coloured” and “I’m a Muslim” victim card, so obviously that amounts to a reversal for reasons I’m not quite sure I understand.
Modern racism is a bit like “Mornington Crescent” in that regard.
There’s also a fraud I’ve started receiving where you get a phone call: “Hello, I’m from the authorisations department, we’ve put a hold on a purchase of (big number) paid from your account. Press 6 to allow this to go ahead.” I always hang up, but I wonder how many people really do press 6, and ponder what sort of technical shenaningans they have rigged up to end up with your money. I don’t think it’s the same as the “hang up and phone us back” scam where they play a dial tone and you actually get back to them still on the line. This rather post-dates my Herbert & Proctor.
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