Scam Statistics in UK 2026 | Types, Losses & Key Consumer Facts

Scam in United Kingdom 2026

The scam landscape in the United Kingdom has reached an alarming new threshold in 2026, with official data from multiple government bodies and fraud prevention agencies confirming that losses, case volumes, and the sheer complexity of fraud tactics have all hit record highs. Fraud now accounts for nearly 44% of all reported crime in England and Wales, according to Cifas’s Fraudscape 2026 report, making it not just the most common crime type in the country but also the most financially devastating one. From authorised push payment (APP) scams and investment fraud to romance scams and identity theft, the breadth of criminal methods being deployed against UK consumers has never been wider — or more technologically sophisticated. Criminals are now leveraging artificial intelligence, deepfake video, voice-cloning tools, and professional-looking cloned websites to deceive victims in ways that would have seemed almost impossible just five years ago.

What makes the UK scam crisis of 2026 particularly difficult to contain is how deeply it has embedded itself across every channel of daily life. Online platforms, telephone networks, social media, email, and even dating apps have all become active vectors for fraud, and the data shows that no age group, income bracket, or region of the UK is immune. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) recorded an estimated 4.4 million incidents of fraud in the year ending December 2025 — the highest figure since tracking began in 2017 — while Cifas’s National Fraud Database documented over 444,000 individual fraud cases filed by member organisations in 2025 alone, averaging more than 1,200 cases every single day. Total financial losses from scams across the UK reached £3.4 billion in 2025, and with AI-powered fraud tools becoming cheaper and more accessible to criminal networks, the threat in 2026 continues to escalate.

Interesting Facts: UK Scam Statistics 2026

Source: Cifas Fraudscape 2026, GASA State of Scams UK 2024, ONS, City of London Police, UK Finance

The table above brings into sharp focus just how pervasive and financially destructive scamming activity in the UK has become. The fact that fraud makes up nearly half of all crime in England and Wales is a statistic that should stop every consumer in their tracks — this is no longer a niche problem affecting a small minority but a nationwide epidemic that touches families across every social and economic background. The combined £3.4 billion lost in 2025 dwarfs the spending budgets of many public services and represents real money taken from real people, often from savings built up over decades.

What the data also reveals is the growing asymmetry between the scale of the problem and how little of the damage is actually undone. With only 18% of victims recovering all their money, the financial blow is, in most cases, permanent. The average loss of £1,400 per victim across all scam types, rising to £25,612 per victim for investment fraud alone, shows that scammers are targeting higher-value individuals with increasingly sophisticated methods. The 1,200+ fraud cases filed daily to the National Fraud Database — and that is only what gets reported — suggests that the true scale of scamming in 2026 is almost certainly far higher than any official figure can fully capture.

Authorised Push Payment (APP) Fraud in the UK 2026

APP Fraud Loss Trend (H1 Each Year, £ millions)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

H1 2023  ██████████████████░░░░░░░░  £249m (est.)
H1 2024  ████████████████████░░░░░░  £230m
H1 2025  █████████████████████████░  £257.5m  ▲ 12%

Purchase Scams share of APP cases: 72%
Investment Fraud share of APP losses: 38%
APP Fraud % of all UK fraud losses (H1 2025): 41%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: UK Finance Half Year Fraud Report 2025, UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2025

Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud remains one of the gravest and fastest-evolving threats facing UK banking customers. The 12% jump in losses to £257.5 million in the first half of 2025 alone — despite an 8% fall in the number of cases — tells a particularly concerning story: scammers are becoming more selective, targeting fewer victims but engineering higher-value deceptions. The extraordinary 55% year-on-year surge in investment scam losses to £97.7 million in H1 2025 is the most alarming single data point here. Criminals are using professional-looking websites, AI-generated video endorsements from fabricated public figures, and convincing cloned brokerage platforms to lure victims into transferring savings that, in many cases, represent a lifetime of work.

Purchase scams, while generating the highest volume of APP cases at 72% of all reports, tend to involve smaller individual sums — but their sheer frequency makes them a constant drain on UK consumers. The 66% online origination rate for APP fraud in 2025 underlines why the UK’s Online Safety Act and pressure on technology platforms to take more responsibility is intensifying. Banks and payment providers blocked a remarkable £870 million in fraudulent unauthorised transactions in the first half of 2025 — roughly 70 pence of every pound targeted — yet the fraud getting through still totals hundreds of millions. The gap between what is stopped and what is stolen highlights the enormous scale of criminal activity directed at UK consumers on a daily basis.

Identity Fraud and Account Takeover Statistics in UK 2026

Cifas National Fraud Database — Fraud Type Breakdown 2025
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Identity Fraud       ████████████████████████████░░░░  54% (242,000 cases)
Misuse of Facility   ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  24% (106,000+ cases)
Account Takeover     █████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  18% (78,000+ cases)
Money Muling         ████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  ~5% (22,000+ cases)

Total NFD Cases 2025: 444,993 (highest ever recorded)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: Cifas Fraudscape 2026

Identity fraud continues to be the dominant fraud type recorded in the UK, accounting for 54% of all cases filed to the National Fraud Database in 2025, despite a marginal 3% fall in overall filings. That decline, however, masks a deeply worrying shift in criminal strategy rather than representing any genuine improvement in consumer safety. Fraudsters are increasingly pivoting from outright identity fraud — stealing personal details to open new accounts — towards account takeover (ATO), where they use stolen or AI-synthesised credentials to hijack existing accounts. The 6% rise in account takeover cases to over 78,000 in 2025, combined with a 38% spike in SIM swap attacks, reflects how criminals are automating credential theft at industrial scale, particularly targeting mobile phone accounts.

The 43% surge in misuse of facility cases to over 106,000 is equally alarming and is closely tied to the expanding money mule network operating across the UK. Bank accounts are at the centre of this crisis, accounting for 82% of all misuse filings, and the payment fraud category within this sector rose an extraordinary 239% during 2025, now making up 40% of all misuse cases. The introduction of a dedicated money mule filing category in 2025 has already surfaced more than 22,000 cases, the vast majority involving personal current accounts — a clear signal that criminal networks are actively recruiting individuals, often under financial pressure, to act as unwitting or complicit conduits for stolen funds.

Investment Fraud Statistics in UK 2026

Investment Fraud — Annual Losses (£ millions)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

2022  ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░  £493m (est.)
2023  █████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░  £521m (est.)
2024  ████████████████████░░░░░░░░  £700m (est., FY reports)
2025  ████████████████████████████  £879.8m  ▲ Highest on record

34,673 reports in 2025 — UP 31% on 2024
Average loss per victim: £25,612
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: City of London Police / Report Fraud, UK Finance Half Year Fraud Report 2025

The £879.8 million stolen through investment fraud in 2025 is a figure that deserves to be read slowly. That is £2.4 million lost every single day, or £1,675 every minute, almost entirely representing money that ordinary UK consumers had saved with the intention of securing their financial futures. The 31% rise in reports to 34,673 is not merely a reflection of increased awareness — City of London Police have confirmed it reflects a genuine surge in criminal activity, with fraudsters exploiting the UK’s cost-of-living pressures, volatile financial markets, and the proliferation of convincing AI-generated content to reach new victims at unprecedented speed and scale.

What makes investment fraud particularly devastating in 2026 is the combination of high individual losses and low recovery rates. With an average loss of £25,612 per victim — many of whom are approaching or already in retirement — the financial harm is often irreversible. Criminals deploy a now-familiar playbook: professional websites that clone real FCA-regulated firms, deepfake videos appearing to feature trusted celebrities or news anchors endorsing fake investment platforms, and high-pressure follow-up calls from fake “brokers” who cultivate weeks or months of trust before requesting large transfers. Increasingly, victims who have already been defrauded are being targeted a second time through recovery fraud, where criminals posing as specialist law firms or law enforcement officers promise to retrieve stolen funds for an upfront fee — then disappear.

Romance Fraud Statistics in UK 2026

Romance Fraud Losses — UK Financial Year Trend (£ millions)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

FY 2022/23  ████████████████░░░░░░░░░  £82.6m
FY 2023/24  ████████████████████░░░░░  £92m+
FY 2024/25  ██████████████████████░░░  £106m+  ▲ 18%

9,449 reports in FY 2024/25 — UP 9%
Average loss per victim: £11,222
Highest individual loss (FY 2024/25): £2,664,783
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (City of London Police), Action Fraud, Barclays

Romance fraud in the UK has crossed the £100 million loss threshold for the first time in official reporting, with the 2024/25 financial year recording £106 million in losses across 9,449 reports — an 18% rise on the previous year. These numbers almost certainly underrepresent reality: shame, embarrassment and emotional attachment to the perpetrator mean many victims never report at all. The fact that the average loss stands at £11,222 per victim — and that a single individual lost over £2.6 million in a single year — demonstrates how emotionally sophisticated these scams have become. Fraudsters invest significant time in building fake but convincing relationships, often communicating for weeks or months before making any financial request, by which point the victim’s emotional investment makes scepticism extremely difficult.

The demographic picture is equally instructive. While people aged 50–59 file the most reports, and nearly half of all romance fraud losses come from victims aged 55–74, the data from platforms like dating apps and social media shows younger adults are increasingly exposed. Men now outnumber women in reports filed for the second consecutive year, challenging long-held stereotypes — though women still lose larger average sums, likely reflecting the longer, more intensive manipulation tactics applied to female victims. The rise of AI voice-cloning and deepfake video tools is making it harder than ever to detect fake identities, with 66% of UK adults telling Barclays in early 2026 that AI has made these scams significantly harder to spot.

Overall UK Fraud Losses and Crime Volume in 2026

UK Fraud Incidents — ONS Crime Survey (millions)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

YE Mar 2017  ████████████████████████░░░░  3.4m (baseline)
YE Mar 2024  █████████████████████████░░░  3.2m
YE Mar 2025  █████████████████████████████ 4.2m  ▲ 31%
YE Jun 2025  █████████████████████████████ 4.1m
YE Sep 2025  █████████████████████████████ 4.2m
YE Dec 2025  ██████████████████████████████ 4.4m  (highest since 2017 baseline)

Fraud % of all crime in England & Wales (2026): ~44%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS), Cifas Fraudscape 2026, GASA State of Scams in the UK 2024

The overall picture painted by ONS fraud data through December 2025 is one of a crime category that has grown faster than any other area of recorded crime in the UK. The 4.4 million estimated fraud incidents in the year ending December 2025 represent a 30% increase compared to the earliest comparable ONS data from 2017, and the 15% rise in bank and credit account fraud to around 2.7 million incidents alone signals how deeply payment-related fraud has penetrated daily financial life. The fact that 3.2 million of the 4.4 million incidents involved a financial loss means the majority of victims felt real economic harm — and while 2.4 million were fully reimbursed, that still leaves close to 800,000 incidents where victims received no or partial refunds.

The broader economic context is staggering. Fraud now costs the UK economy an estimated £219 billion annually, according to Cifas, which includes up to £81 billion in public sector losses — money that would otherwise fund hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. When the GASA State of Scams report calculates total consumer scam losses at £3.4 billion in 2025, this is only the portion that reaches official reporting channels; dark figure estimates suggest the real total may be multiples higher. The psychological toll is just as real: 71% of fraud victims reported emotional impact in the ONS survey, with 49% experiencing anger and many describing lasting effects including loss of confidence and feelings of shame. These human costs sit entirely outside the headline financial figures and represent a dimension of the UK scam epidemic that statistics alone cannot fully convey.

Phishing and Online Scam Statistics in UK 2026

Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) — Cumulative Reports
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

April 2020  ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  Launch
April 2022  ████████████░░░░░░░░░  ~10 million reports
April 2024  ███████████████████░░  ~30 million reports
April 2025  ██████████████████████ 41 million+ reports

217,000 scam websites removed
393,395 malicious web pages taken down
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), UK Government Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2025, Cifas Fraudscape 2026

The 41 million reports submitted to the Suspicious Email Reporting Service since its 2020 launch tell the story of a public that is increasingly aware of phishing but still under constant bombardment from criminals. The removal of 217,000 scam operations across nearly 400,000 web pages through SERS represents a significant public protection effort — yet the sheer volume of new scam infrastructure being spun up by criminal networks means the battle is far from won. In 2026, phishing campaigns in the UK have become markedly more personalised and convincing, with fraudsters using AI to scrape professional profiles, company websites, and publicly available data to craft targeted emails that reference genuine colleagues, recent projects, and real business transactions.

For UK businesses, the picture is especially stark: 43% were hit by a cyber-attack or security breach in 2025, and of those that experienced a breach, 93% traced it back to a phishing attempt. With an average cost of £5,000 to £7,500 per attack and fraud losses from phishing-related scams exceeding £1.2 billion in 2025, the commercial damage to UK enterprise is substantial. The emergence of AI voice-cloning and deepfake video tools as phishing enablers has added a new dimension that even security-conscious professionals find difficult to counter — 53% of UK adults told Barclays researchers in February 2026 they were concerned about having their voice or image impersonated online, and the 38% rise in SIM swap attacks in 2025 indicates that criminals are combining phishing with real-time account hijacking at growing speed and scale.

Consumer Demographics and Vulnerability in UK Scam Statistics 2026

Emotional & Financial Impact of Fraud on UK Victims (ONS YE March 2025)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Felt emotionally affected       ███████████████████████████░░░  71%
Experienced annoyance           █████████████████████████████░  75% (of those affected)
Experienced anger               ████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░  49%
Experienced shock               ███████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  27%
Felt shame / embarrassment      ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  13%
Suffered financial loss (total) ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  31%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Source: ONS Fraud and Computer Misuse YE March 2025, Cifas Fraudscape 2026, GASA State of Scams in the UK 2024, City of London Police

The consumer vulnerability data reveals a more nuanced picture of who the UK’s scam crisis hits hardest. The ONS finding that disabled people and women face statistically greater odds of fraud victimisation — even after controlling for other demographic variables — points to the targeted and opportunistic nature of criminal fraud networks. People living with disabilities may be more reliant on digital and telephone channels where impersonation is easier to execute, while women’s relatively higher victimisation rate in general fraud categories contrasts with the romance fraud picture, where men now file slightly more reports but women suffer larger financial losses. Older victims aged over 61 saw a 13% rise in identity fraud filings in 2025, with Cifas data suggesting that stolen identities from older individuals are being used to open basic banking products — a finding backed by the dramatic 455% spike in personal instant-access account fraud.

Perhaps the most revealing consumer statistic of all is the reporting gap. Only 71% of UK scam victims report what has happened to them, meaning that nearly 3 in 10 victims suffer in silence — driven by shame, self-blame, or a belief that nothing can be done. Given that even the officially reported figures represent tens of thousands of cases and billions of pounds in losses, the true scale of the UK scam epidemic in 2026 is almost certainly significantly larger than any dataset currently captures. With only 18% of victims recovering all their money and the emotional aftermath being felt by 71% of those defrauded, the human cost of this crime wave extends far beyond balance sheets and into people’s mental health, confidence, and long-term wellbeing.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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