£1.3bn stolen through fraud in 2021

It shows the scale of fraud taking place as well as how criminals took advantage of people’s doubts and fears during the pandemic to commit fraud, doing this by exploiting weaknesses outside of the banking system.  

Unauthorised fraud made up £730.4m of the money stolen from consumers, with £583.2m stolen through authorised push payments (APP). Looking at APP losses more closely, nearly 40% was through impersonation scams.   

The banking and finance industry did however prevent a further £1.4bn of unauthorised fraud from getting into the hands of criminals.  

Commenting on the report’s findings, UK Finance’s managing director of economic crime Katy Worobec said: “Fraud has a devastating impact on victims and the money stolen funds serious organised crime, as well as imposing significant costs on the wider economy.  

 “Unauthorised fraud losses fell last year, but this type of criminal activity remains a major problem. Through the introduction of new measures such as strong customer authentication, coupled with continued investment in technology, the banking and finance industry prevents significant amounts of fraud from taking place. 

“Authorised fraud losses rose again this year as criminals targeted people through a variety of sophisticated scams, with much of the criminal activity taking place outside the banking sector, often involving online and technology platforms. This is why we continue to call for other sectors to play a greater role in helping protect customers from the scourge of fraud.  

“The upcoming Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill is an important development and provides the opportunity for the government to give new powers on information sharing and tracking stolen money. These are things we have long called for and will support efforts to work together and stop the fraud happening in the first place.” 

The £730.4m figure lost through unauthorised financial fraud across payment cards, remote banking and cheques was a decrease of seven percent compared to 2020.  In addition to this drop, victims of unauthorised payment card fraud are legally protected against losses with industry analysis showing customers are refunded in excess of 98% of all confirmed cases.  

When it comes to AAP fraud, criminals impersonated a range of organisations such as the NHS, banks and government departments via phone calls, text messages, emails, fake websites and social media posts to trick people into handing over their personal and financial information. 

They subsequently used this information to convince people into authorising a payment.  

Overall, There were 195,996 incidents of APP scams in 2021 with gross losses of £583.2m. Most of the losses - £214.8m worth - came from impersonation scams, where criminals impersonate organisations to trick people into giving away their personal and financial information.

£171.7m was lost to investment scams, the second largest category of APP losses, while there were £64.1m losses from purchase scams. Despite these low losses, 99,733 purchase scams took place - making it the most common type of scam, accounting for 51% of all cases.

Of the £583.2m lost through APP scams, a total of £271.2m were returned to the victims, accounting for 47% of the losses.

Off the back of these figures, UK Finance has reaffirmed its calls for greater cross-sector action to tackle the problem and said it will continue working with the government on upcoming legislation in this area.