Action Fraud

(asked on 19th November 2018) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information his Department holds on the number of people who attempted to make reports of fraud to Action Fraud over the latest 12-month period for which data is available; of those who attempted to make such reports how many were successful over that period; how much enforcement activity was undertaken as a result of those reports; by which police authorities such action was undertaken; how many telephone calls were made to Action Fraud over that period; and, of those calls, how many were answered by Action Fraud.


Answered by
Ben Wallace Portrait
Ben Wallace
This question was answered on 27th November 2018

Action Fraud provide online and telephone based services which enable the reporting of both fraud and cyber dependent crime.

Between October 2017 and September 2018 the service received 505,497 calls.

Of these callers, 314,668 callers spoke to a member of staff. The 190,829 callers that did not speak to a member of staff will include callers that chose to use the online service or callers who waited but did not receive an answer.

505,587 reports were made in this period, by phone or online, of which 318,629 were classified as crimes as set out in the Home Office Counting Rules. In the same period 57,181 crimes were disseminated for enforcement, by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), which analyses reports of crime made via Action Fraud. The NFIB disseminated a further 20,075 reports in this period either as intelligence or as a result of concern for the victim, this is in addition to victim based referrals made by contact centre staff direct to their local police force.

Force breakdown for outcomes are also available at this webpage
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/crime-outcomes-in-england-and-wales-2017-to-2018

Reticulating Splines