UK Fraud Cases Jump 12% as Criminals Find New Scams

Fraud reports continue to climb in the United Kingdom despite legislative victories.

Last year saw 3.3 million reported cases of fraud in the U.K., a 12% increase over the 2023 numbers, according to the UK Finance group’s annual report, released Wednesday (May 28).

The report said the 3.3 million figure represented the highest number of cases in UK Finance’s series of comparable data, even as the dollar amount of reported fraud, 1.17 billion pounds (about $1.58 billion) remained more or less unchanged from year to year.

“While this points to a reduction in the average loss per case, criminals are targeting ever more victims in order to maintain flows of illicit funds with more people having to deal with the resulting stress, inconvenience and emotional harm that entails,” the report said. “As criminals are having to work harder to socially engineer and trick victims, as well as navigating banking and payments systems to find weaknesses, the industry was equally doing more to step up and meet that challenge.”

For instance, last year saw a 16% uptick in the amount of prevented unauthorized fraud, according to the report. This figure covered fraud that was identified and stopped during the payment process; it does not apply to cases where warning messages caused a payment to be abandoned earlier in the process.

The report also found that losses from authorized push payment (APP) fraud dropped to 450 million pounds in 2024 from 460 million pounds in 2023. APP fraud refers to scams in which victims are tricked into transmitting money to a fake account.

Unauthorized fraud refers to scams in which someone makes a transaction using bank details or credit cards without the owner’s knowledge. Last year, the U.K. instituted a new rule requiring banks and payment companies to reimburse the victims of APP following a surge in these fraud cases.

“But with heightened industry attention on APP fraud, criminals have sought to extract larger sums from more ‘profitable’ scams,” the report said.

That has meant an increase in remote purchase fraud, which reached more than 2.5 million cases last year, per the report.

The findings came as social engineering scams and others outpace traditional fraud prevention measures, PYMNTS reported this month.