The UK’s new National Fraud Strategy launched on Monday offering a three pillar approach to tackle what has become the most common crime in the country.
The strategy, launched by Minister of State Lord Hanson, explains how the UK plans to disrupt the methods used by criminals and how victims can be better supported.
It presented a three pillar approach: Disrupt, safeguard and respond.
This encompasses cutting off the tools and technologies used by criminals, in part through the launch of an Online Crime Centre; strengthening public and business resilience through proactive policing and marketing and improving victim support with measures such as a new fraud reporting service and stronger civil and criminal powers to bring offenders to justice.
The strategy has been backed by £30m of public investment and will focus on high-tech fraud disruption that uses AI and cross-industry data sharing to proactively shut down scam accounts and operations.
While the strategy can be seen as a much-needed attempt from the government to tackle a problem costing the country billions, it notably did not include a policy of sharing the burden of reimbursements that much of the payments and finance industry has been calling for.
For some years now, the fintech and traditional finance sectors have complained that fraud policy requires the party that processes the fraudulent payment to be responsible for reimbursing the victim.
The issue as described by payments providers is that the vast majority of fraud today originates from social media tech platforms, either through scam advertising, fake accounts or direct messaging.
The research seems to back this up and what’s more, reveals that companies like Meta, the owner of the platforms wherein most scams come from, make significant revenue from scammers, including through paid advertising.
Research commissioned by Revolut found that social media platforms last year profited £430m from scam adverts targeting UK users.
“It’s time to stop the ‘fraud profit’ and mandate that Big Tech shares the economic responsibility,” said Riccardo Tordera-Ricchi, VP of policy and government relations at The Payments Association.
“Collaboration is good, but accountability is better. We continue to believe that economic incentives should be mandated, as the payments industry cannot shoulder the economic burden of reimbursement alone when fraud continues to originate on other players’ platforms.”
