UK police admit Action Fraud replacement will not be live by April as planned

Police have confirmed the long-awaited replacement service for Action Fraud, the United Kingdom’s much maligned national reporting center for fraud and financially motivated cybercrime, will not be live by April as previously planned.

Speaking to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) on Wednesday, officials from the City of London Police — which contracted out the building of the new service to Capita and PwC with the aim of it being “operational in Q2 2024” — said they had “not been able to achieve” the original date.

A spokesperson for the City of London Police told Recorded Future News: “The replacement service for Action Fraud is well underway and planned to go live in 2024, but we have not set a date.

“We need to launch a fully functioning service that works better for victims of fraud across the country. We are ensuring the new service and technology is fully developed, tested and rolled out to all law enforcement partners,” the spokesperson added.

PwC and Capita did not respond to a request for comment.

The move to a new service follows damning criticism of the British government’s response to fraud from the Justice Committee, which previously said efforts to tackle the issue needed “a wholesale change in philosophy and practice.”

Action Fraud was particularly criticized by that committee’s report, which repeatedly described the service as “not fit for purpose,” and warned that at the time of publication the government was presiding over a 25% annual increase in reported fraud cases.

Despite its name, Action Fraud does not involve any actions to tackle fraud, and is merely a reporting service providing victims with a crime reference number for insurance purposes. Individual victims of fraud and business victims have complained that the service is difficult to use.

Alternative outcomes

Chris Bell, the service delivery director at City of London Police, told the committee on Wednesday that there was “absolutely” a recognition that “Action Fraud had to be modernized and transformed and we've been working on that programme for the last two years.

“We are due to launch a replacement service for Action Fraud during 2024. It's likely to be later in the year when we're able to bring those services live,” Bell said.

Although it is intended to provide intelligence to law enforcement, Action Fraud does not currently collect evidence for police investigations — for instance the postal address used to receive goods fraudulently purchased online.

Bell suggested that collecting such evidentiary material was not likely to be a priority of the new service. “We can't just rely on investigating our way out of it. We do need alternative outcomes,” he told the committee.

Instead, the new service is being built around generating insights that can be rapidly shared with industry to help prevent victimization at scale. Bell said these services would be introduced incrementally “from later this year.”

Asked to clarify what this meant, Bell said: “We are building a service to go live, and then we'll continue improving and adding enhancements on an ongoing basis into the service. So we can get the new world live whilst we continue to build those enhancements.”

The committee chair, Dame Diana Johnson, said: “When will you actually have a functioning Action Fraud reporting service with everything it needs to be effective? We were told April.”

“April was an estimate,” said Bell. “Like any complex service there's quite a number of projects that are intertwined, it's going to take us a little bit longer to get to a stage to launch the service. It was the ambition to launch in 2024, we believe we will do that, we've just not been able to achieve the April date, which was our original target back in 2020."

Nick Adams, the assistant commissioner at City of London Police, told the committee: “Given the history of Action Fraud, we want to absolutely get right the new system before we launch it, because nothing [would be] worse ... [than] if people lose confidence in it from the outset.”

Losing confidence

Due to the scale of fraud, as well as the lack of resources and skills in policing, alongside jurisdictional challenges — with roughly three quarters of fraud in the U.K. involving an overseas component — police rarely bring fraudsters to trial.

Fraud is the most common crime in England and Wales, accounting for over 40% of all reported offenses. The National Crime Agency has suggested that this is likely an undercount, estimating that 86% of all fraud offenses go unreported.

But even among the wholly domestic fraud cases, the statistics show a dramatic absence of any traditional justice system response. According to the Justice Committee report, despite 4.6 million fraud offenses being committed in the year ending September 2021, there were just 7,609 defendants prosecuted for fraud and forgery in the same period — equivalent to just 0.16% of cases.

“The level of focus from policing is inadequate to deal with the scale, complexity and evolving nature of fraud,” found the Justice committee, adding: “There is simply not the capacity within the criminal justice system to tackle the millions of fraud crimes taking place each year.”

Following that inquiry, the government published a Fraud Strategy — which the Home Affairs committee is now scrutinizing — that aimed to reduce fraud 10% from its pre-pandemic levels in 2019 by taking three steps; pursuing fraudsters (e.g. by prosecuting them), blocking fraud (e.g. by encouraging industry to catch incidents), and empowering people (e.g. by helping victims recover funds).

New rules will come into force in Britain later this year that could see victims of romance and investment scams reimbursed by the banks who send and receive these fraudulent payments in a radical change to who is liable for these losses.

Parliament is also currently debating a new law that could allow the intelligence services to monitor internet logs in real-time to identify online fraud and interrupt criminals during the act.

The Home Office strategy involved the creation of a new National Fraud Squad, intended to “take a proactive intelligence-led approach and focus on high-end frauds and organized crime,” using “covert and overt intelligence gathering capabilities” to identify the “worst offenders domestically and overseas.”

It added that teams across the National Crime Agency, the City of London Police, and the broader British intelligence community would “work together to share intelligence in real-time to drive enforcement action across government and the private sector.”