Government stops over £480 million ending up in the pockets of fraudsters over twelve months since April 2024 - more money than ever before.
Government stops over £480 million ending up in the pockets of fraudsters over twelve months since April 2024 - more money than ever before.
New technology and artificial intelligence turns the tide in the fight against public sector fraud, with new tech to prevent repeat of Covid loan fraud.
Over a third of the money saved relates to fraud committed by companies and people during the pandemic.
Crackdown means more funding for schools, hospitals and vital public services to deliver the Plan for Change.
Fraudsters have been stopped from stealing a record £480 million from the taxpayer in the government’s biggest ever fraud crackdown, meaning more money can be used to recruit nurses, teachers and police officers as part of the Plan for Change.
Over a third of the money saved (£186 million) comes from identifying and recovering fraud committed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Government efforts to date have blocked hundreds of thousands of companies with outstanding or potentially fraudulent Bounce Back Loans from dissolving before they would have to pay anything back. We have also clawed back millions of pounds from companies that took out Covid loans they were not entitled to, or took out multiple loans when only entitled to one.
This builds on successful convictions in recent months to crack down on opportunists who exploited the Bounce Back Loan Scheme for their own gain, including a woman who invented a company and then sent the loan money to Poland.
Alongside Covid fraud, the record savings reached in the year to April 2025 include clamping down on people unlawfully claiming single persons council tax discount and removing people from social housing waitlists who wanted to illegally sublet their discounted homes at the taxpayers’ expense.
Announcing the record figures at an anti-fraud Five Eyes summit in London, Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons said:
Working people expect their taxes to go towards schools, hospitals, roads and the services they and their families use. That money going into the hands of fraudsters is a betrayal of their hard work and the system of paying your fair share. It has to stop.
That’s why this government has delivered the toughest ever crackdown on fraud, protecting almost half a billion pounds in under 12 months.
We’re using cutting-edge AI and data tools to stay one step ahead of fraudsters, making sure public funds are protected and used to deliver public services for those who need them most - not line the pockets of scammers and swindlers.
The savings have been driven by comparing different information the government holds to stop people falsely claiming benefits and discounts that they’re clearly not eligible for.
The high-tech push brought around £110m back to the exchequer more than the year before, and comes as the government pushes to save £45 billion by using tech to make the public sector more productive, saving money for the NHS and police forces to deliver the Plan for Change.
The Minister will also unveil a new AI fraud prevention tool that has been built by the government and will be used across all departments after successful tests.
The AI system scans new policies and procedures for weaknesses before they can be exploited, helping make new policies fraud-proof when they are drafting them. The tool could be essential in stopping fraudsters from taking advantage of government efforts to help people in need amid future emergencies.
It has been designed to prevent the scale of criminality seen through the Covid pandemic, where millions were lost to people falsely taking advantage of furlough, Covid Grants and Bounce Back Loans.
Results from early tests show it could save thousands of hours and help prevent millions in potential losses, slashing the time to identify fraud risks by 80% while preserving human oversight.
The UK will also licence the technology internationally, with Five Eyes partners at the summit considering adoption as part of strengthening global efforts to stop fraud and demonstrating Britain’s role at the forefront of innovation.
The summit will bring together key allies and showcase the government’s unprecedented use of artificial intelligence, data-matching and specialist investigators to target fraud across more than a thousand different schemes.
At the summit, Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons will describe how the record crackdown has been achieved:
Over £68 million of wrongful pension payments were prevented across major public sector pension schemes, including the Local Government Pension Scheme, NHS Pension Scheme, Civil Service Pensions and Armed Forces pension schemes. These savings were achieved by identifying cases where pension payments continued after the individual had died, often with relatives continuing to claim benefits they were not entitled to.
More than 2,600 people were removed from housing waiting lists they weren’t entitled to be on, including individuals who were subletting or had multiple tenancies unlawfully.
Over 37,000 fraudulent single-person council tax discount claims were stopped, saving £36 million for local councils and taxpayers. These false claims, often made by individuals misrepresenting their household size to secure a 25% discount, were uncovered using advanced data-matching.
Today’s announcement follows extensive progress on fraud in the last 12 months, including the appointment of a Covid Counter-Fraud Commissioner, introduced the Public Authorities Fraud, Error and Recovery Bill, and boosted AI-driven detection, saving hundreds of millions and strengthening public sector fraud prevention – driven by the Public Sector Fraud Authority.
The majority of the £480 million saved is taxpayer money, with a portion from private sector partners, such as insurance and utilities companies, helping lower consumer costs and support UK business growth.
www.theregister.com 2025/08/28/ -
US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers
Shoppers and merchants in Germany found themselves dealing with billions of euros in frozen transactions this week, thanks to an apparent failure in PayPal's fraud-detection systems.
According to the Association of German Banks, the problem hit on Monday when banks noticed a slew of recent unauthorized direct debits from PayPal. The body said the banks responded in various ways, which is one way of putting it – the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that some stopped all PayPal transactions, with the total number of frozen payments likely to be around €10 billion.
A spokesperson for the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV), which represents hundreds of regional banks across the country, confirmed the issue to The Register. The DSGV said PayPal had assured it the problem was resolved, adding that PayPal payments had been running smoothly since Tuesday morning and the US payments platform was informing affected customers "directly."
The DSGV said the unauthorized payments had a "significant impact on transactions throughout Europe, particularly in Germany." However, there have been no confirmed reports of the incident being felt outside Germany. Austrian media reported that the banks there had seen no problems.
PayPal is the most popular method of online payment in Germany, having been used for 28.5 percent of online purchases last year, according to research by the EHI Retail Institute. (The next most popular option is buying on account.)
That's largely down to PayPal's payment protection, which appeals to privacy-conscious Germans. In the wake of the unauthorized direct debit issue, financial industry consultant Peter Woeste Christensen told local media that PayPal's particular strength in Germany was partly thanks to the poor user experience of German banks' own apps.
PayPal had not responded to The Register's request for comment at the time of publication, although SZ quoted a spokesperson as saying PayPal had quickly identified the cause and was working with banks to "ensure all accounts are updated." The US company referred to the incident as a "temporary service interruption."
PayPal's reputational hit in Germany is likely to be exacerbated by last week's reports of hackers offering millions of PayPal credentials that they claimed PayPal had recently exposed in plaintext. The hackers' claims appear dubious, with PayPal denying any recent breach, but the reports gained significant traction in Germany.
"It's possible that the data is incorrect or outdated," read a Wednesday advisory from the German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest, which bundled the leak report with this week's snafu. "Nonetheless, PayPal users should change their passwords as a precaution."
The number of reported cyber incidents and online threats in Switzerland rose sharply last year, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Last year, almost 63,000 cyber-related incidents were reported to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in Switzerland, an increase of 13,500 cases over the previous year. Between July and December, the NCSC recorded more than 28,000 incidents, slightly fewer than in the first half of 2024.
Fraud, phishing and spam messages continue to be the most frequently reported incidents. The increase on the previous year is mainly due to the phenomenon of false calls in the name of the authorities, with almost 22,000 reports compared with around 7,000 the previous year.
On the other hand, the number of e-mail threats has dropped. Over the past four years, fraudsters have used the telephone more as a communication channel.
The FBI is warning the public that criminals exploit generative artificial intelligence (AI) to commit fraud on a larger scale which increases the believability of their schemes. Generative AI reduces the time and effort criminals must expend to deceive their targets. Generative AI takes what it has learned from examples input by a user and synthesizes something entirely new based on that information. These tools assist with content creation and can correct for human errors that might otherwise serve as warning signs of fraud. The creation or distribution of synthetic content is not inherently illegal; however, synthetic content can be used to facilitate crimes, such as fraud and extortion.1 Since it can be difficult to identify when content is AI-generated, the FBI is providing the following examples of how criminals may use generative AI in their fraud schemes to increase public recognition and scrutiny.
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Cyber attacks are common occurrences that often make headlines, but the leakage of personal information, particularly credit card data, can have severe consequences for individuals. It is essential to understand the techniques employed by cyber criminals to steal this sensitive information.
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