Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to tackle online financial fraud.

Online fraud is a devastating and pernicious crime can cause devastating financial and emotional harm to victims. The Government has been working with partners in the public and private sectors to keep the public safe and bring these fraudsters to justice.

We have introduced the Online Safety Bill, which will tackle online fraud and fraudulent advertising. Fraud is included as priority offence on the face of the Bill. This means that companies will have to take robust, proactive action to ensure that user-generated fraud is not readily published or exposed to users on their platforms. The Online Safety Bill also contains a fraudulent advertising duty covering Category 1 & 2A companies (user-to-user services with the highest reach and search functions). These duties will have significant impact on some of the highest harm fraud types, including romance, pension and investment frauds.

DCMS is also leading work on developing the Online Advertising Programme, which will be considering further regulation of online advertising which will also help to reduce online fraud.

We have also been working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre who launched their Suspicious Email Reporting Service in April 2020. This has already led to over 11 million reports received and the removal of over 78,000 scams and 144,000 harmful websites to date. We continue to encourage the public to report fraud to Action Fraud and to forward any suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk and suspicious texts to 7726, free of charge.

Industry have been working hard on tackling the threat of online fraud, including through the Online Fraud Steering Group (OFSG), which is a public-private group co-chaired by the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), UK Finance and Tech UK.