Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she has taken to tackle the threat of online personal scams to vulnerable people.

The Government’s Joint Fraud Taskforce (a coalition between government, industry, law enforcement and the third sector) continues to lead an ambitious programme of work to design out and prevent fraud that occurs both online and offline. This includes theTake Five fraud awareness campaign, designed to urge the public and businesses to take time to consider whether a situation they find themselves in is genuine.

Online personal scams are increasingly perpetrated via cyber-enabled methods. To protect victims, the Government set up the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in October 2016. The NCSC is the UK’s technical authority on cyber security and provides a single, central body for cyber security at a national level. The NCSC works very closely with law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community to help prevent, disrupt and investigate cyber-crime and other online cyber related threats. In 2018 the NCSC took down 22,133 phishing campaigns, including 14,124 UK government-related phishing sites, and the total number of takedowns of fraudulent websites was 192,256, across 2018, with 64% of them down in 24 hours.