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Fraud crime costs UK over £30bn a year

Published on 22 Jan 2010 under category: legal

Britain loses over £30 billion a year to fraud crime, a new report has claimed.

The National Fraud Authority (NFA) yesterday released the UK's first 'comprehensive' fraud estimate, including previously unpublished figures.

A previous report by ACPO (Levi) has estimated that fraud costs the UK £13 billion a year, but that figure was based solely on publicly available information.

The increased figure was partly due to consumers being willing to report falling victim to mass-market scams. Sale fraud, lottery and loan frauds cost individuals around £3.5 billion.

According to the NFA, private sector fraud amounted to £3.8billion with £1 billion in mortgage fraud and over £2billion lost in insurance fraud.

Industries hit hardest by fraud included consumer goods (£1.3 billion), the manufacturing industry (£1 billion) and the technology, media and telecommunications industry (£948 million).

Attorney general Baroness Scotland QC, who superintends the NFA said:"We need more organisations to measure and report the money they lose to fraud, so we can continue to build our knowledge and response to this endemic crime."

The report's authors qualified that the total amounts for the public and voluntary sectors were probably 'under-estimated' because of reluctance to report incidences of fraud.

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