UK victims lost more than a billion pounds to con artists and scams last year, according to the latest official figures
Data from UK Finance showed that people in the UK lost £1.3bn through online fraud, with a large portion of the scams attributed to authorised push payment (APP) fraud.
APP fraud is where criminals pretend to be a trusted contact to get a victim to send money, with £583.2mln stolen in 2021 through incidents of this kind, up 39% on 2020.
Last year, there was a total of 195,996 incidents, up 27% from the year before, as work-from-home restrictions meant people spent more time online, making them susceptible to such scams.
Of all the APP frauds, impersonation scams made up 40% of losses, with an estimated £214.8mln stolen by criminals pretending to be banks, government departments and the NHS via text, phone calls and fake websites.
CEO scams, where criminals would pretend to be a senior member of staff, sending emails to the account departments of clients for urgent payment, grew the most in terms of losses last year, with losses for this type of scam climbing 165% to £12.7mln.
Other types of scams include romance scams and purchase scams, where victims would buy a product that does not exist.
UK Finance said £271.2mln was returned to victims of APP scams, but the banking industry group called on more to be done by online platforms to tackle the problem.
“Authorised fraud losses rose again this year as criminals targeted people through a variety of sophisticated scams, with much of the criminal activity taking place outside the banking sector, often involving online and technology platforms,” said Katy Worobec, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance.