By number of incidents, fraud made up 46% of crime in the year to June, and it rose 11% while the total held flat, the Office for National Statistics says. Police records show shoplifting and knife crime falling, but part of that is recording.
Almost half of the crime adults in England and Wales experience is now fraud, and it is the one big category still growing. The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asks a sample of the public about their experience, estimated 9.7 million crimes in the year to June 2026, no significant change on a year earlier. Fraud accounted for 4.5 million of them, up 11%.1
Most of that rise was bank and credit account fraud, up 13% to 2.8 million. Theft (2.7 million), violence (939,000) and criminal damage were all unchanged in a statistical sense. Computer misuse, such as hacking and malware, rose 23% to 817,000, though it is still 54% below its 2017 level.1
The police-recorded figures, published alongside, told a more encouraging story: knife-enabled offences down 6%, firearms offences down 8%, shoplifting down 2%. But the ONS says police records are not a reliable guide to trends, and the shoplifting fall has a recording explanation, set out below.1
The ONS singles out bank and credit account fraud as the driver but does not explain it further.1 The Home Office does, in its Fraud Strategy 2026–2029: criminals use new technology to scale up, almost half of estimated frauds are online-enabled, over two-thirds of cases have an international element, and generative AI makes attacks more convincing and harder to spot.2 Its ministers say criminals are “operating across borders with increasing impunity”.2
Fraud’s growing share is not only about fraud. The strategy puts it at 45% of survey crime in the year to September 2025, up from 31% in 2016.2 Since the survey first counted fraud in the year to March 2017, fraud is 34% higher while the total is 14% lower, so by the desk’s arithmetic everything else is down by about a third.1 The share rises because the rest of crime has shrunk.
The shoplifting fall is more contested. The ONS says some incidents that would once have been recorded as shoplifting are now classed as robbery under a clarified rule, which is why business robbery rose 67%. Retailers are wary: the Federation of Independent Retailers questioned whether the fall reflects a real drop, citing reporting difficulties, and the British Retail Consortium said “progress on tackling shop theft is still too slow”.146
Victims of fraud mostly face the slowest route to justice. The Home Office says fraud cases take over 626 days to reach charge, against 80 for the average case, and that prosecutions have fallen 56% since 2015.2 Reports to the national service are a small slice of the total: the 349,000 made to Report Fraud directly compare with the survey’s 4.5 million incidents, though the two count different things.1
The harm is not only financial. The Home Office puts the cost of fraud at at least £14.4 billion in 2023–24.2 A Police Foundation study in February, based on a survey of victims in two English force areas, found 58% reported a physical health symptom linked to the fraud and 64% had changed their behaviour.3
The government’s answer is a three-year strategy with more than £250 million behind it, including £31 million for a new Online Crime Centre.2 It sets no percentage target for cutting fraud; it commits to building measures to track it. The City of London Police commissioner, Pete O’Doherty, said in July that “we cannot wait another 20 years” for the response to catch up.5
Why bank and credit account fraud rose 13% in particular; the ONS gives no breakdown of the other fraud types. Whether the rise in reports to the new Report Fraud service reflects more fraud or better reporting, since the system launched in December 2025. And how much of the shoplifting fall is real, which the ONS cannot separate from the recording change.
The next ONS crime release is on 28 January 2027.1 Under the Fraud Strategy, next steps on unauthorised fraud are due by the end of 2026, the Online Advertising Taskforce reports to ministers in early 2027, and a Fraud Victims Charter follows in 2027. A business-funded fraud unit is planned for 2028/29.2 Retail groups want a start date for the shop-worker protections in the Crime and Policing Act, passed in April, which the shopworkers’ union Usdaw says are not yet in force.4