You asked:
Please, can you send me all fraud statistics on reported offences since 2011. My target focus of interest is UK Cyber Crime or any form of fraud that was cyber enabled; involving the use of a computer or the internet. The data I am looking for is to cover national crime reporting statistics, broken down by county and by fraud type. Please provide all reported information relating to the fraud cases. I do not need names of individuals or anything that may be private in nature. I also want the data separated into two categories. Category 1 is complaints by individuals, Category 2 are complaints by business organisations.
We said:
Thank you for your enquiry.
We publish statistics on the number of crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales. Within these statistics cyber crime is not in itself a separate legal offence and thus does not form part of the offence list that is reported within the Official Statistics.
The recorded crime dataset does however include a breakdown of fraud offences recorded by the police. From April 2011, Action Fraud began to take over responsibility for centrally recording fraud offences that were previously recorded by individual police forces in England and Wales. The transfer to Action Fraud was phased over a two year period, with Action Fraud taking over full responsibility for recording fraud offences from April 2013.
While the breakdown of fraud types used by Action Fraud does not routinely distinguish between offences which involve the use of a computer or the internet and those that occur by other means, there are some types of fraud that, by definition, only occur online. These are outlined in the following list. It is important to note however that these fraud types will not cover the full extent of cyber crime reported to Action Fraud.
- Online shopping and auctions
- Computer software service fraud
- Computer virus/malware/spyware
- Denial of service attack
- Hacking
The latest published figures on fraud offences recorded by Action Fraud are in the quarterly statistical bulletin ‘Crime in England and Wales, Year Ending June 2016’. A link to the relevant set of tables is provided – see Appendix table A5. This table also includes reports of fraud from two industry bodies, Cifas (a UK-wide cross-sector fraud and financial crime prevention service) and Financial Fraud Action UK (a body which coordinates fraud prevention activity within the UK financial services industry):
England and Wales is the lowest geographical level at which we can provide this offence breakdown, although total Action Fraud offences by police force area are now available and published in Experimental table E14 in the following link
Statistics for the fraud types previously listed are available from 2011/12 onwards - please see the following links:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables/current (back to year ending June 2014)
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-314526 (for years ending March 2012 and March 2013)
However, the phased transfer of responsibility to Action Fraud between April 2011 and March 2013, and the move to centralised recording of fraud makes comparisons over time problematic, as during the transition period two reporting arrangements for fraud were operating in parallel, with some police forces referring cases to Action Fraud and other forces recording them independently. Therefore, published trend data on fraud recorded by the police cover both offences recorded by individual police forces up to the year ending 2013, and those recorded through Action Fraud. For more information on this please see our ‘User Guide to Crime Statistics for England and Wales’:
In respect of other types of cyber-crime (beyond fraud) these are not separately identifiable in the recorded crime dataset, a new system of ‘flagging’ cyber crimes in the police recorded crime data has been introduced and these data are now published as Experimental Statistics. Experimental table E15 in the following link presents a breakdown of police recorded offences that were flagged as online crimes in the year ending June 2016:
In addition to statistics on crimes recorded by the police, the ONS also publishes crime statistics based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), a face-to-face victimisation survey in which people resident in households in England and Wales are asked about their experiences of a range of crimes in the 12 months prior to the interview. The survey enables us to produce estimates of crime which include offences that do not come to the attention of the police. We have recently completed a substantial project to develop new questions on fraud (both online and offline) and other types of cyber-crime for inclusion in the CSEW. These were only introduced into the live survey from October 2015, however sufficient data have been gathered to produce initial estimates of fraud and computer misuse and these were published alongside the quarterly release, ‘Crime in England and Wales, year ending June 2016’ in October 2016.
These first estimates have been released as Experimental Statistics (please see the aforementioned link) as they are still in the testing phase and not yet fully developed. We plan to incorporate these new offences into the headline CSEW estimates for the year ending September 2016 (due to be published in January 2017), when a full year’s interview data will be available. The first full year-on-year comparisons will not be available until January 2018, following which trends in the data will begin to emerge. The experimental tables provide estimates for a range of offence types relating to fraud and computer misuse, including computer viruses and unauthorised access to personal information (including hacking), the large majority of which will be cyber related crimes by their very nature. This is supported by Table E12 which presents not only the proportion of incidents of computer misuse that were flagged as cyber crimes, but also the proportion of incidents of fraud, by fraud type. Unfortunately we do not currently know what proportion of other crime types reported in the CSEW are cyber crimes.
The sample size for the CSEW is not designed to provide estimates at lower level geographies, and so data on CSEW fraud and computer misuse are available at England and Wales level only. In addition, the survey does not cover crime against commercial or public sector bodies, although the Home Office run an annual Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) which asks respondents from a representative sample of business premises in certain sectors in England and Wales about crimes experienced at their premises in the 12 months prior to interview, including online crime. The most recent 2015 CVS findings can be accessed here: