The Fraud Pandemic

This is the first full-length analysis of the challenges posed by an emerging fraud pandemic in England and Wales, charting the future for principled fraud criminalisation in this jurisdiction.

This book provides the first in-depth scholarly analysis of fraud, the highest volume crime in England and Wales, addressing the challenges faced in building a principled criminal law response by presenting an innovative normative analysis.

The UK is now in a pandemic of fraud. There were 4.6 million fraud offences recorded in the year ending March 2021, accounting for 42% of all crime committed against individuals. Fraud is now the highest volume crime in England and Wales; its incidence in the first half of 2021 was described by UK Finance as a ‘national security threat’.

The book provides the answers to key questions, such as:
- How can the rapidly changing nature of fraud be understood and mapped by criminal lawyers?
- How does fraud connect to economic crime more broadly?
- Is the current landscape for criminalising fraud fit for purpose, in the light of changes to the nature and complexity of wrongdoing?
- What are the principled limits to using Artificial Intelligence technologies to detect and to penalise fraud?
- Which principles should inform fraud criminalisation and governance following the COVID-19 pandemic, to meet the challenges of a digital age and a stretched criminal justice system?