- Payment fraud in the UK is £3b- EIGHT TIMES higher than Banking Industry estimates.
- Richardson Hartley Law which runs National Fraud Helpline sponsored Parliamentary report
- APPG On Fair Banking calls for everyone to do more to fight fraud
- Launch event at the Houses Of Parliament deemed a ‘great success’
The true scale of payment fraud in the UK is around eight times higher than currently estimated by the banking industry, according to a new fraud report by the APPG on Fair Banking.
Richardson Hartley Law, which runs National Fraud Helpline, sponsored the report and a launch event at the Houses of Parliament which was attended by banks, regulators, MPs and the media, as well as victims of fraud.
While banks and regulators have said that fraud through Authorised Push Payments (APP) stands at around £380m a year, the report calculates that these losses are, in reality, about £3bn per annum.
The report also exposed how in the past five years banks have been slower to spot fraudulent activity on scam victims’ accounts.
Phil Brickell MP, who prior to his election in July 2024 worked for more than a decade across a number of financial institutions tackling financial crime and corruption said: “The findings of this report reconfirm my gravest fear – that fraud is one of the biggest challenges facing our country today. Banks spend billions of pounds every year trying to contain the problem. But given the prevalence of fraudsters on social media platforms, tech firms in particular need to go much further to protect consumers and businesses.”
Every speaker at the event told of their desire for everyone to work together to fight the scammers.
The full list of speakers were:
🎤 Phil Brickell MP – Host and financial crime expert
🎤 Simon Fell – Former Government Anti-Fraud Champion
🎤 Heather Buchanan – Chair of The Athena Foundation
🎤 Martin Richardson – Richardson Hartley Law
🎤 Alma Talbot – APP fraud victim.
The event created great interest in the media with representatives of The Sun, The Times, The Mirror, The FT, the Daily Mail and Which? Magazine all in attendance. The Times, The Daily Express, The Sun and the Mirror all ran pre-pieces on the event.
Martin Richardson, senior partner at Richardson Hartley Law and National Fraud Helpline, said: ‘The event was a great success. There was huge consensus in the room that everyone must do more to fight the fraud plague.
‘We cannot leave the fight to the banks. Everyone needs to be better at fraud prevention, particularly tech platforms.
‘Our law firm will always fight for scam victims to reclaim their money but we also want to help prevent fraud.’
To calculate the underlying value of APP fraud, the report took existing figures from the Payment Services Regulator and the finance trade body, UK Finance, as well as other anti-fraud groups such as CIFAS, and applied industry standard estimates for the proportion of fraud that goes unreported each year. Using these data points the APPG arrived at a figure of £3bn for the underlying loss to APP fraud each year, far higher than the figures of £341m and £460m put out by the Payments Services Regulator and UK Finance in their respective annual fraud surveys.
The report also revealed for the first time how banks and PSPs are failing to identify and catch frauds in a timely manner, meaning their customers are making more, not fewer, payments to scammers for each case of fraud that occurs. In 2020 victims of all types of APP fraud were making an average of 1.6 payments to scammers in each case of fraud. By 2024 that figure had risen to 1.8 payments per case, a jump of 16% according to an analysis of figures from UK Finance.
The trend with respect to payments per case is particularly stark for some of the most pernicious and damaging types of APP fraud such as romance scams. In this category the number of payments for each case rocketed from 5.5 in 2020 to 10.8 in 2024, a near doubling in just four years. Similarly with investment scams the average number of payments made to fraudsters rose from 2.4 to 3.6, a rise of 46% over the same four year period.
The report calls for all parties to do more to tackle APP fraud, noting how only 2% of police resources are dedicated to tackling fraud dispute the it accounting for 40% of UK crime. Equally, social media companies have a key part to play with four out of ten scams now involving the three main Meta platforms; Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Mr Richardson said: ‘We knew from our own experience of dealing with thousands of fraud recovery cases that significantly more than £400m was being lost to APP fraud each year..
‘Even so, it is shocking to think that around £3b is lost every year to this type of payment fraud. We see the human misery caused by the fraudsters on a daily basis. Lives are being ruined financially and emotionally. We’ve dubbed it a “scamdemic” and much more needs to be done to protect the public.
‘Our fear is that as scammers adopt more technology this figure is only set to rise. Everyone needs to do more. This can’t just be left to the banks. We have become too accepting as a society that we are constantly being targeted by fraudsters.’
The full fraud report can be found here: APPG For Fair Banking Report
Have you lost money to a scam? Contact National Fraud Helpline. Call 0333 0033218 or fill out our Claim Form.