One online crime every TEN minutes

MORE than 150 internet-fuelled crimes are recorded every day by police, figures show.

Forces in England and Wales logged at least some online element in more than 55,000 offences in the year ending June 2017.

They included harassment, blackmail and child sex allegations – and the tally suggests one web-related crime is registered every ten minutes on average. Fraud and computer misuse are not included in the figures, contained in tables published by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month.

Some 55,866 offences were flagged as online crimes from July 2016 to June 2017 – nearly 20,000 higher than the 36,995 registered in the previous 12 months.

Harassment and stalking made up the larg- est chunk of the online-flagged crimes, with 33,148 in the period. Other web offences included 8,012 obscene publications crimes, 6,327 child sex claims and 2,081 blackmail allegations.

But internet crimes accounted for only 1.2 per cent of all offences logged in the year to June – totalling 4.5million, excluding fraud.

A spokesman for the National Police Chiefs Council said: ‘We are continuing to invest in giving all our officers the digital skills to investigate these crimes as well as having specialist teams.

‘For some online crimes, there is a need for the technology industry to work with us to make it harder for criminals and abusers to operate online.’