UK has Suffered Fraud and Cyber Crime Losses Worth £1.3 Billion in 2021

London incurred the highest amount of losses to cybercrime and fraud in the first half of 2021, amounting to as much as £629 million. 

Companies and individuals in the UK suffered three-fold losses to cybercrime and fraud in the first half of 2021 as compared to the same period last year. The figures have been announced by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, the agency that compiles reports of cybercrime and fraud from Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for such crimes.

The report revealed that between January 1st and July 31, 2020, victims suffered losses worth £414.1m to cybercrime and fraud. In the same period in 2021, the amount has surmounted to £1.3 billion. 

The high figures can be attributed to the huge increase in fraud cases reported in 2021 compared to 2020 – in the first half of 2020, 39,160 cases were reported to Action Fraud while in 2021, the number of reports increased to 289,437. 

The report states that where individual victims lost 2.6 times more money to fraud in the first six months of 2021, organizations lost 6.6 times more during the same period. 

Following the report, experts have advised the UK’s government to create more awareness for the education of individuals regarding the dangers of phishing attacks and the value of implementing cybersecurity best practices. Additionally, they have also urged organizations to take more proactive steps for the mitigation of risks related to work-from-home.

To look at it region-wise, London suffered the highest amount of losses amounting to £629 million, followed by £236.2 million in the South East and £233.3 million in Eastern England. 

On the other hand, Scotland performed much better than London, with losses of just £47.6 million. Northern Ireland incurred £24.5 million in losses. Smaller figures were recorded in the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, although these regions should be considered outliers in the data because of their much smaller comparative populations.

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