The UK has published its new Anti Fraud Strategy (2026 -2029), which like the last one published in 2023 has much to commend it. The highlight is the Online Crime Centre a public private collaboration that is at last following the Anti Scam Centres set up up by leading countries in Asia including Singapore in 2019 and more substantively in 2022.

It has though one glaring omission. It has no target. This may be because the previous Strategy had one but that didn’t work out so well, so maybe the idea of setting targets has been shelved. No one is disputing lots of effort went into tackling fraud under the last strategy or will in this one.

Still it’s important to remind ourselves what the target was in 2023, otherwise it will be forgotten and the lessons won’t be learned. It was a single target to achieve a 10% reduction in fraud against 2019 levels by December 2024.

In 2019-20 Fraud accounted for approximately 38% of all crime in England and Wales, with 3.7 million fraud cases against individuals reported. The total cost to society of fraud against individuals in England and Wales was estimated to be at least £6.8 billion in 2019-20. 

As at September 2025 Fraud accounted for approximately 45% of all crime in England and Wales, with 4.2 million fraud cases against individuals reported. The total cost to society of fraud against individuals in England and Wales was estimated to be at least £14.4 billion in 2023-24.

As Henry Ford said “the only real mistake is one which we learn nothing from”