Email: Fraud

(asked on 19th July 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Barran on 19 July (HL1969), what proportion of the 6,500,000 reports received by the Suspicious Email Reporting Service resulted in the removal (1) a scam, (2) a web address, and (3) both.


Answered by
Baroness Barran Portrait
Baroness Barran
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This question was answered on 2nd August 2021

The Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) provides the public with a route for the escalation and removal of suspected phishing campaigns. The automated SERS processes emails received from the public, and if a malicious web address (URL) is identified in the email, a take down request is submitted to the hosting provider. To date we have identified more than 97,500 individual malicious URLs for removal which equates to 50,5000 individual scam campaigns. Multiple reports of the same scams have been forwarded to SERS. The total number of reports to SERS stands at 6.5m as at 30th June 2021.

SERS is one tool in HMG’s response to cybercrime, and is intended to empower people to simply forward suspicious emails to the NCSC for action. Full details of the NCSC’s comprehensive response to the proactive identification and removal of malicious activity on the internet can be found in its Active Cyber Defence Year 4 report. This report outlines all the measures the NCSC takes to identify and remove the malicious activity before it ever reaches the public, and can be found at https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/acd-report-year-four

If a person falls victim to a phishing email, that should be reported to Action Fraud and it will be logged as a crime.

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