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The National Crime Agency has welcomed the Government’s new Fraud Strategy, which will bolster the organisation’s commitment to protecting the public against fraudsters particularly those operating upstream, overseas and online.

James Babbage, Director General (Threats) at the National Crime Agency said: “Fraud is the most prevalent crime in the UK, causing victims long-lasting emotional and psychological harm as well as financial loss.

“Over the last three years, the National Crime Agency has been building a stronger response to fraud with open investigations across UK law enforcement up 75%, convictions up 27% and increasingly driving disruptions overseas. However, the threat will continue to grow globally, and the launch of the Fraud Strategy provides the basis for a further step change in our collective work to protect the UK public from these criminals.

“We have worked intensively with partners from the financial, telecommunications, technology and cybersecurity sectors, and piloted a range of new approaches to fraud and cybercrime: sharing data, stopping and blocking more online crime at source, and helping to design out vulnerabilities through more resilient industry processes.

“We have seen strong engagement and positive results, and are looking forward to working with our partners in City of London Police, GCHQ, NCSC and NCF in the new Online Crime Centre.”

The Strategy, launched today, will see the NCA lead a new Online Crime Centre (OCC), alongside the Home Office, to scale up and accelerate the prevention of online crime by those involved upstream by working side by side with the private sector.

The OCC means the NCA will be able to adopt and apply emerging technologies to combat fraud and combine the strengths of the private sector, law enforcement and intelligence community to spot criminality early and act to stamp it out through disruption and enforcement.

This initiative will build on the NCA’s longstanding Public Private Partnership (PPP) initiatives which provide a structure for collaboration between the public and private sector in response to serious and organised crime threats, representing a significant collaboration between UK policing and intelligence community, and private sector partners from the financial, telecommunications, technology and cyber industries.

It will connect the data, knowledge and expertise of each partner into a central hub for the first time, allowing seamless data sharing, trend analysis and intelligence co-ordination, enhancing our response to online crime and allowing high-impact law enforcement action to be taken earlier.

Most recently, we have seen this at work with industry partners like Google, sharing information from law enforcement on email accounts and URLs suspected to have been used by criminals engaged in fraud and cyber crime. These were shared through the Global Signal Exchange and allowed Google to disrupt criminals abusing their services. This work will be able to increase across industry with the Online Crime Centre.

The NCA’s overseas international work will also be further expanded and supported under the strategy as we continue to tackle fraudsters at source.

The OCC will benefit from the NCA’s collaboration with international law enforcement to conduct joint investigations.

This partnership working most recently led to the arrests of seven men in Nigeria accused of using bogus social media accounts to impersonate cryptocurrency traders targeting UK and US based victims. 

And in July 2025, the India Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided a fraudulent call centre in Uttar Pradesh, resulting in multiple arrests. This followed collaboration and intelligence sharing between the CBI, NCA, FBI and Microsoft to identify the organised crime group, build a case and target the complex IT infrastructure used by the criminals. Over 100 UK victims had been contacted, with total losses over £390,000.

More than 1,200 criminals across Africa who had targeted nearly 88,000 victims were arrested in a UK-supported, INTERPOL coordinated operation. A total of $97.4m was recovered during the operation which saw investigators from the UK and 18 African countries working together to tackle high-harm, high-impact crimes including investment fraud, business email compromise and ransomware. Private sector partners strengthened the operation by providing intelligence, guidance and training to help investigators act on intelligence and effectively identify offenders.

Additionally, after a box of UK SIM cards were seized on the Thai border, with assistance from the Royal Thai Police, the NCA was able to cross-reference serial numbers with UK suppliers. This meant telecoms operators could share the identified SIM numbers into Stop Scams UK (SSUK), a membership programme of telecom, financial and tech platforms, to stop the risk of sim diversion and stopping fraud at source. Work like this is indicative of the public private partnership that we will build on through the new Online Crime Centre.

In the UK, Operation Henhouse – a country-wide campaign against fraud co-ordinated by the NCA’s National Economic Crime Centre (NECC) and City of London Police – has just completed its fifth year.

Every single UK police force and Regional Organised Crime Unit has again taken part in the operation which last year resulted in 422 arrests, 155 voluntary interviews, account freezing orders against £3.9 million and seizures of cash and assets worth £7.5 million.

Operation Henhouse is an ongoing commitment showing a real-time crackdown against fraudsters across policing and the public sector.