Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the impact of online (a) scams and (b) fraud on vulnerable adults in the last 12 months.

The scale of online fraud is alarming, and we are deeply concerned by the devastating impact it can have on victims both financially and emotionally. We are committed to tackling fraud and holding those who profit from it to account. We will be publishing our new fraud strategy early in 2023.

The Home Office does not collate statistics regarding costs to victims of online fraud. The most recent estimate of the total cost of fraud against individuals in England and Wales was estimated at £4.7 billion for 2016. As of March 2022, online fraud was estimated at 61% of fraud (CSEW). This data can be found in table 4 here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/natureofcrimefraudandcomputermisuse.