Unmasking The Biggest Online Scams: A Deep Dive Into The Past 8 Years

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We’re spending more time online than ever and with advances in technology such as the metaverse, that only looks set to increase. There are criminals everywhere and as more of our life takes place online, scams are on the rise and scammers will continue to look for new opportunities. According to the NFIB’s Fraud and Cyber Crime Dashboard, there were over 400,000 reports of fraud and cybercrime in the UK in 2021 alone. With the internet connecting us at an international level, the importance of global identity verification software will increase and while the metaverse may bring around more online avatars and accounts, biometric authentication is crucial. And although fraud is evolving, we cannot overlook other scams such as phone calls, impersonation of phone numbers, text message fraud, or impersonation fraud where victims are persuaded to click links to fraudulent sites, give out their credit card information, social security number or other financial information, or buy gift cards.

At Veriff we wanted to explore how the biggest scams on the internet have evolved over the years, so we looked at ONS Crime in England and Wales Statistics data, which uses Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data, for the past 8 years to map how the crimes that took place online have varied.

How online scams have changed over time

Online shopping scams have consistently been the most common for the past eight years, averaging 68,190 incidents of people falling victim a year on shopping websites, despite seeing an overall decline of 12%. With the rise in online shopping websites and the ability for shops to link out to their e-commerce sites from social media, it’s easy to see why these scams are so common. 

Advance fee frauds, which are scams where people are promised a larger reward that will come later for a smaller sum of money now, came in second place consistently with an average yearly figure of 28,368. Despite average yearly instances being less than half of the most common scam, advance fee frauds have increased by a whopping 43% over the past 8 years. 

The type of scam which has seen the biggest increase over the past 8 years are hacking scams, which have increased by an incredible 274%. There has been a huge increase in people sharing more personal information than ever on social media, but these apps require little verification and there is a huge risk of people being catfished or scammed. 

Lottery scams have decreased by the largest amount and are happening 46% less than they were 8 years ago. The National Lottery has a page on its website about scams and is clearly taking active steps to help people avoid being scammed.  

How to avoid the biggest online scams

1. Online shopping scams 

According to Which the best ways to avoid online shopping scams are to spend some time browsing the rest of the site and check for a ‘contact us’ page. To stay protected you should never pay by bank transfer. 

2. Advance fee frauds 

The Police Service of Northern Ireland recommends never sending money via transfer to someone you’ve never met and to be cautious of anything that seems too good to be true - sit back and think about if this situation seems likely. 

3. Computer software service fraud 

Computer software service fraud can be prevented by never allowing someone else to take control of your computer, never downloading software and remembering that no reputable company will ever contact you out of the blue, according to the Met Police’s little guide to preventing fraud and cybercrime. They advise that if you’re unsure you should contact your service provider directly to confirm.

4. Hacking (social media and email)

LinkedIn suggests that if you suspect you’ve been hacked you should log into your account to check if any other devices are logged in, use a strong and unique password for each of your social media accounts and use two factor authentication. 

5. Computer viruses / malware 

The best way to avoid computer viruses, according to BeCyberSafe is to ‘dodge, deny, detect’. This means you ‘dodge’ by practising safe habits to avoid your computer being exposed, you ‘deny’ by making it difficult for viruses and malware to install themselves and ‘detect’ by catching any which do. 

The online scams that have increased and decreased most over time

The scams which have the most variation in frequency are passport application fraud and HMRC (His Majesty's Revenue and Customs) fraud. We can see that passport application fraud reduced in 2019, possibly as a result of the pandemic, while travel restrictions were in place people were unlikely to be renewing their passports. There was a shocking 558% increase in passport application fraud in 2014, which may have been contributed to by the fact that there was a huge backlog of applications. This dramatic rise was followed by a -81% decrease in 2015, perhaps as authorities cracked down on the increase from the year before. 

2015 was another big year for online scams as HMRC scams increased by 559%, The gov.uk website published a blog post about the current scams and highlighted the fact that HMRC staff all undertake mandatory training courses to make sure they can identify dangerous emails. 

In 2017 there was a sharp rise in hacking (extortion) scams, the 258% increase may be explained by the rise in bitcoin and scammers feeling as though they can hide behind anonymised accounts while extorting their victims. There have been concerns about the lack of regulation in crypto, but there are regulations which mean that crypto companies must be AML and KYC compliant.

Methodology 

We created our list of online scams by looking at ONS Crime in England and Wales Statistics data, more specifically the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data, for the past 8 years (as far back as comparable data goes). We focussed on Fraud offences recorded by law enforcement agencies like the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau and identifying scams which take place online from this data set. 

We then mapped the total recorded instances of crimes like identity theft for each year to see how they have changed over time and calculated the percentage change year on year. 

*Note: We were unable to include DVLA Driving Licence Application Fraud as the data for 2014 was 0 which did not allow us to calculate an accurate percentage increase.