Fraud cases in the last 10 years

Dyddiad y datganiad:
23 September 2022

​FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4431

You asked

Please provide, for 2021 and for the last 10 years, the following data:

  1. Number of cases you have recorded as under the overall heading of 'Fraud'.
  2. Number of cases per point 1 where a conviction has been recorded.
  3. Number of cases per point 1 referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
  4. How many of the cases in 1 identified a male perpetrator, a female perpetrator, cases where the gender identified was not as assigned at birth, and the number where gender could not be identified.
  5. The age demographics of the victims by ONS standard ten-year age grouping.
  6. Top three reasons CPS rejected the case.
  7. Average time in days cases remained open or 'under investigation' prior to being closed for any reason.
  8. Average time in days of the cases which led to a conviction being closed.
  9. Number of cases leading to a custodial sentence 10. Number of cases progressed by the CPS which failed to secure a conviction at court, for any reason.

We said

Thank you for your request relating to Fraud.

We publish crime data from two main sources; the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime. Our publications and data concern crime as it is experienced by victims, or as it is recorded by police. We do not hold data related to fraud convictions.

We publish data relating to Fraud offences as they are recorded by the Police, in our quarterly appendix tables (Table A4 from row 232). Fraud and computer misuse offences recorded by Action Fraud or referred to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) can be found in Table A5 (row 51).

Questions on fraud were introduced into the CSEW in October 2015, and data relating to fraud for the year ending March 2017 to March 2020 can also be found in Table A1a. Incident rates of fraud collected by the Telephone-operated Crime Survey for England and Wales (TCSEW), which was put in place to capture crime during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic can be seen in Table A2 (row 61 onwards). Please see the year ending March 2021 edition of this dataset for the year ending March 2021 estimates.

This data can be found here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables

The proportion of adults who were victims of fraud, by personal characteristics including an ONS age breakdown from the CSEW/TCSEW can be found in table 10 of our Property crime tables.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are primarily responsible for data on offenders. They publish statistics each quarter on offenders and sentencing, their latest data can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-march-2022

If you have any questions regarding these data, the MoJ may be able to help you further and can be contacted at ESD@justice.gov.uk.

For prosecutions data it would be best to contact the Crown Prosecutions Service (CPS), this is not information we hold, they can be contacted on - enquiries@cps.gov.uk. Their latest data, which includes some information on Fraud cases, can be found here https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/cps-data-summary-quarter-4-2021-2022

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