Fraud convictions at record low as it falls down priority list

FRAUD convictions have fallen to a record low as police warn that organised criminals are exploiting “soft justice.”

The number of successful prosecutions has dropped from a high of 15,500 in 2010 to under 9,000 last year, according to Ministry of Justice data.

Separate figures, from all 43 police forces, show that the proportion of fraud cases that resulted in a conviction fell by a quarter in a year – from 21.9 per cent in 2016/17 to 15.9 per cent in 2017/18.

Last year 293,000 reports of fraud were made to the police but 243,000 of the complaints were not even investigated as the chances of a conviction were deemed too low by “The Brain,” a sophisticated computer system used by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB).

Of the remaining 50,000 reports that were passed on to the police, fewer than one in six resulted in a successful prosecution – a total conviction rate of three per cent.

Police forces blame cutbacks requiring them to prioritise violent and “high harm” offences such as soaring knife crime at the expense of fraud.

However, Alex Eristavi, of the NFIB said organised criminals were increasingly moving into fraud and cybercrime because of the potentially lucrative rewards and lack of tough penalties handed out by the courts.

He said: “When compared to conventional crime, the punishment for fraud is next to nothing.

“It doesn’t recognise the fact that there are real people behind this.

“The sheer fact that a victim has been strung along by someone they thought was a future husband and discover it was all a fake.

“I have heard about marriages breaking down because of fraud. You don’t get that with robberies – you don’t normally see suicides or marriages being lost. There is something missing. Something needs to change.”

The average jail sentence for fraud stood at 18.9 months last year. Prison terms for robbery averaged 49.2 months, drug offences were 36.1 months and criminal damage and arson 29 months.