Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been (a) prosecuted and (b) convicted for organising online phishing scams in each of the last five years.

We are committed to tackling all types of fraud regardless of whether they are committed on- or offline. The Fraud Act 2006 contains a range of offences that can be used to prosecute fraudsters who are suspected of phishing. Sections 6 and 7 of the Act, for example, criminalise the possession, making and supply of articles for the use in fraud which could include computer software programme used to create phishing websites.

Although we hold data on the total number of prosecutions and convictions for offences under the the Fraud Act 2006, we cannot separately identify what proportion of these cases specifically relate to phishing scams.