Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to reduce scam phone calls.

The Home Office and DCMS are in regular discussion with the telecommunication industry on ways to tackle fraud and protect the public.

The Government has taken a range of actions to reduce the number of these calls. For example, we have supported the National Trading Standards Scams Team to roll out call blocking devices to vulnerable people. DCMS have provided over £1 million in the last 3 years to National Trading Standards for distribution of call blocking devices to vulnerable people. This funding has helped to protect some of the most vulnerable in society from nuisance calls and scams.

In addition, the City of London Police, the lead force for Economic Crime, has partnered with Law Enforcement and Industry to combat call centre fraud from overseas jurisdictions.

However, the best way to tackle this problem is to try and identify the sources of these calls and stop them. We are encouraging the public to forward suspicious text messages to 7726 (which is free of charge) and continue to encourage anyone who has been a targeted by a scam to report it. Action Fraud is the central police reporting point for all victims of fraud and can be contacted by phone on 0300 123 2040 or through their website: http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud.

If you have received a scam call, rather than text message, you can also log an information report on the site. Using the information collected from these reporting platforms, law enforcement partners are able to spot patterns of calls/compromised numbers. Using this information, City of London Police (the National Lead Force for fraud, who manage the Action Fraud system), the National Cyber Security Centre and the National Crime Agency are able to facilitate numbers being used for scam calls/texts being blocked or removed.

However, the Government recognises there is more to do and is working closely with communications providers, law enforcement, regulators and consumer groups to consider further legislative and non-legislative solutions.