Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to protect people from online scams.

Online fraud is a pernicious crime that can cause devastating financial and emotional harm to victims. The Government has been working with partners in the public and private sectors to keep the public safe and bring these fraudsters to justice.

The National Cyber Security Centre are leading the way combatting online scams through their Suspicious Email Reporting Service which allows members of the public to forward any suspicious emails and potential phishing scams more effectively and easily to law enforcement. Since its inception in April 2020, it has already led to over 15 million reports and the removal of over 105,000 scams across 192,000 URLs (as of October 2022).

We have also introduced the Online Safety Bill, an ambitious and forward-looking piece of legislation that will tackle online harms including fraud and fraudulent advertising. DCMS is leading further work on an Online Advertising Programme. This will consider further regulation of online advertising, including for fraud. In March 2022, DCMS published their consultation which has now closed, and the Government will publish its response in due course.

We have been working with industry on a voluntary basis. On 21^st October 2021, the newly relaunched Joint Fraud Taskforce published three voluntary charters to combat fraud in the accountancy, retail banking and telecommunications sectors. We have seen progress with one UK mobile operator reporting a 97% decline in scam texts over a nine-month period.

We continue to encourage the public to report fraud to Action fraud and to forward any suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk and suspicious texts to 7726, free of charge.