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Wednesday 30 November 2022 6:30 am
By:
Rosie Beacon
Rosie Beacon is a senior policy analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Around 80 per cent of fraud is enabled by tech. (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)
Fraud is both everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere in that fraud has become part of daily life – Black Friday has historically seen cyber attacks soar by 275 per cent. And it is also nowhere in that, given the scale of the problem, astonishingly little is actually being done about it. Fraud has almost become par for the course: it is largely perceived to be an irritating and – providing you don’t fall for it – inconsequential crime.
But even if you don’t “fall for it”, the notion that fraud is simply a part of daily life is deeply problematic. This perception it is an invisible crime means it is consistently underestimated – a sentiment echoed by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services in 2019: “fraud does not bang, bleed or shout”.
And yet, it is the single largest category of crime in the UK according to the Office for National Statistics (41 per cent), as well as being under investigated and charged. There were 987,000 recorded offences of fraud in the years 2021 – 2022, and only a shocking 4,816 of those ended up with a charge – that’s a 0.4 per cent sentencing rate.
When you’re mugged, the only person responsible is the person that mugged you. It’s obvious, it’s physical and no part was played by the victim in enabling the mugger to take their bag. Whereas the equivalent with fraud is that the victim may not have asked the mugger to turn up, but when asked to, they opened their bag up for them to take all of their money.
While finding out how to ignore fraud is an important part of modern, tech driven lives, avoidance will…
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