Britain sees 12% spike in fraud cases as banks battle $1.6 billion epidemic

By Lawrence White

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain's financial sector saw a record 3.31 million fraud cases in 2024, up 12% on the year before, according to data from industry body UK Finance released on Wednesday, as criminals responded to efforts to combat complex scams by ramping up high-volume, low-value attacks.

That increase led to a total of 1.17 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) being stolen in 2024, unchanged from the year before, as firms showed limited progress in combating a problem that accounts for 41% of all reported crime in Britain and which banks and regulators have said threatens financial stability.

Fraud "causes severe harm to individuals, society and our economy, as the stolen money goes to serious organised crime groups, both here and abroad," said Ben Donaldson, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance.

Britain has in recent years emerged as the global epicentre for scams and fraud, Reuters reported in 2021, as criminals take advantage of super-fast payment channels, relatively light policing of such crimes and the prevalence of the world's most widely used language, English.

Finance industry players have since then increased efforts to fight so-called authorised payment fraud, where people are tricked into sending money to criminals via social engineering techniques.

Awareness campaigns and technology that can flag fraud have helped reduce a form of scam that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, when social distancing measures drove more people online and into the clutches of scammers who often spoke with victims for days or weeks as they drained their funds.

Criminals in 2024 instead ramped up so-called remote purchase fraud attempts, often compromising one-time passwords to enable fraudulent purchases on e-commerce sites, the UK Finance data showed.

Yet the UK Finance data on reported fraud is just the tip of the iceberg, with fraud going chronically unreported by its victims, said Jim Winters, head of financial crime at Britain's second-biggest mortgage lender Nationwide.

One in seven consumers in Britain is exposed to potentially fraudulent emails per day, but 43% of them would not report fraud if they were the victim or witnessed it, research from Nationwide showed.

($1 = 0.7389 pounds)

(Reporting By Lawrence White; Editing by David Holmes)