Police recording more than 150 crimes linked to internet every day

MORE THAN 150 internet-fuelled crimes are recorded by police every day on average as a mounting number of investigations centre on cyberspace.

Official figures show forces in England and Wales registered at least some online element in more than 55,000 offences including harassment, blackmail and child sex allegations in the year ending June 2017.

The tally suggests web-related crimes are being logged at a rate of one every 10 minutes.

Fraud and computer misuse are not included in the statistics, as those are recorded centrally, but they give an insight into the digital footprint across other crime categories.

In April 2015, it became mandatory for police to return quarterly information on the number of crimes flagged as being either fully or partially committed online. The latest findings show 55,866 offences were flagged by officers as online crimes from July 2016 to June 2017.

The count is nearly 20,000 higher than the 36,995 registered in the previous 12 months, although the data sources were not identical for both periods.

Harassment and stalking made up the largest chunk of the online-flagged crimes, with 33,148 in the year to June – meaning around one in seven (14 per cent) of all the offences in the category involved the internet.

The online flag was also applied to 8,012 obscene publications offences, 6,327 child sex offences and 2,081 blackmail offences – accounting for 42 per cent 13 per cent and 29 per cent of the total numbers of recorded crimes in those brackets respectively.