Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many reported instances of fraud committed by fake travel operators there were in each year since 2010.

The Home Office collects quarterly data on the number of reports of fraud made to Action Fraud and that have been recorded as criminal offences by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB). This data is published as official statistics by the Office for National Statistics on a quarterly basis and is available from June 2015 to December 2020 in table A5 below:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables.

It is not possible to distinguish how many reports of fraud committed by fake travel operators were recorded as these could fall under the various fraud types, such as ‘Time share and holiday fraud’, ‘Ticket fraud’ and ‘Other fraud’ depending on the circumstances.