Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he has taken to help reduce (a) advance fee fraud and (b) other consumer retail scams.

As part of implementation of the Government’s Fraud Strategy ‘Advance fee fraud’ has decreased by 33% since the year ending September 2022 from 546,000 to 367,000 offences (CSEW data). We have introduced a series of sector charters with industry to agree voluntary actions to protect consumers. Last year, the Government published the Online Fraud Charter which seeks to block fraud at source, making reporting fraud easier for users and decreasing the time it takes to remove content and advertisements found to be fraudulent.