Governments Expand Anti-Scam Measures and Shift Responsibility to Industry
The UK government unveiled a new national fraud strategy aimed at reducing the country’s most common crime by shifting more responsibility for scam prevention onto telecom providers, technology platforms, and financial firms. The plan follows criticism that fraud—estimated at roughly 40% of recorded crime in England and Wales, with a majority cyber-enabled—has not received a commensurate law-enforcement response. UK authorities are also restructuring fraud intake and analysis through Report Fraud, a new national reporting system intended to replace Action Fraud and improve pattern detection and alerting, with stakeholders warning that outcomes will depend on the quality and reliability of submitted data.
In parallel, other governments are rolling out more aggressive anti-scam initiatives. Dutch national police launched the “Game Over?!” campaign, threatening to publicly identify 100 scam suspects unless they surrender, as part of a broader effort to curb impersonation fraud such as fake police officer and fake bank employee scams that have surged in recent years. In the US, an executive order directed multiple agencies to produce a 120-day action plan to prevent, disrupt, investigate, and dismantle transnational cybercrime organizations (including scam-center operators) and proposed a Victim Restoration Program to return seized or forfeited funds to victims of cyber-enabled fraud, supported by a new operational unit to improve interagency coordination and information sharing, with private-sector threat intelligence used “when appropriate.”
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