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After years of pressure, banks are finally doing something to tackle fraud. It’s time for telecoms firms, email providers and search engines to step up

I can’t quite believe I’m writing this – but I think the banks may be getting their act together on fraud. Before you tear this newspaper up and use it to line your cat’s litter tray, hear me out.

Fraud is now truly endemic in Britain. In February, there were 48,000 instances reported to City of London Police, which leads fraud prevention nationally, up from 31,000 in the same month last year. In just over a year, £2.5bn has been lost.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, lockdown has led to a surge. A dangerous cocktail of extra time spent online, bank branch closures, tales of people making fortunes on various cryptocurrencies and record low savings rates have created a scammers’ paradise.

For years, Telegraph Money has highlighted methods employed by criminals and fought to retrieve readers’ stolen cash – almost always, it has to be said, from their banks, not the criminals. Usually this is “authorised push payment” fraud, where victims unwittingly approve a bank transfer to an account operated by a criminal. In the first half of 2020, cases of APP rose by 18pc, with the amount lost rising 12pc to £164m, according to the latest figures from UK Finance, the banking trade body.

The true figure is likely to be far higher. This headline figure includes investment scams, where people believe they are placing money with legitimate companies offering reasonable returns, and romance scams, often involving older women becoming convinced a genuine relationship has been established, before they are fleeced.

In essence, the scams are all the same. People say criminals are getting increasingly sophisticated. In reality, they are getting better at exploiting data leaks and working around security systems.

After intense pressure, in 2019 the largest banks agreed to set up a (voluntary) refund code for victims. Two years on and more people than ever are getting their money back, usually because their bank was found not to have given adequate warnings. There is huge variation. Some banks, such as TSB, refund almost all the money stolen from customers. Others are paying back as little as 1pc of claims, anonymised data from the Payment Systems Regulator shows.

This is not good enough, but at least the industry is taking the problem seriously. The same cannot be said for telecoms firms, email providers and search engines. It is still laughably easy to find adverts for firms that are high-risk at best, and outright scams at worst, at the top of search results for terms such as “safe investment”. Google and others say they pull thousands of ads every day, but it’s too little, too late. Search engines sell advertising space via automated bidding processes, with little to no human involvement. Why doesn’t Google set up a compensation pot, funded by the revenue it earns from firms whose ads it goes on to remove? I think you know the answer.

All the while, calls are growing louder for the Online Harms Bill to be urgently amended. As it stands, the law would give new powers to Ofcom to police offensive content on the internet, but would do nothing to stamp down on internet fraud. None of us can afford to let this opportunity slip away.

Criminals are getting better at exploiting data leaks and working around security systems