Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the level of trends in (a) online and (b) telephone fraud in the last five years.

The Home Office collect statistics from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) on the number of fraud offences recorded and these are published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Tables A4 and A5 of the quarterly crime statistics at:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables

Although Action Fraud requests information on enablers (e.g. online, telephone, post) when frauds are reported, it is voluntary for victims to provide it and not verified. As a result there is likely to be a significant number of offences that should have been flagged as, for example, online but are not, as well as incorrectly classified offences. NFIB intend to revisit this issue once their new management information system has been launched.

The ONS recently added new fraud and cyber crime questions to the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). As part of this development, they also added a question to ask victims whether the internet or any type of online activity related to any aspect of the offence experienced. As such, it should be possible to estimate the level of online fraud against individuals from this and ONS are developing their plans for publishing this information.