The UK government’s new Online Crime Centre has drawn broad support from banks and fintechs – but also pointed questions about funding, platform accountability and whether execution will match ambition
The UK government’s Fraud Strategy 2026–2029, published this week, centres on a new Online Crime Centre launching in April 2026 that will bring together police, intelligence agencies, banks, mobile networks and technology firms to share intelligence in real time.
Backed by over £30m (US$40.3m) in funding which sits within a broader £250m three-year commitment, the OCC is designed to build a single picture of global fraud networks and act on it fast enough to block scam texts, freeze criminal accounts and remove fraudulent social media profiles.
UK Fraud Minister Lord Hanson said the aim is to “shut down the channels scammers rely on, wherever they operate from”, in recognition of the two-thirds of scams affecting UK citizens which originate overseas, with domestic enforcement alone insufficient.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is attending the Global Fraud Summit in Vienna this week to push for wider international enforcement partnerships, building on intelligence-sharing agreements with Nigeria and Vietnam that have already produced arrests and compound takedowns in the past year.
The announcement comes at an important time for the UK’s financial sector, when APP fraud reimbursement obligations have sharpened banks’ exposure to fraud losses, and the criminal networks behind those losses have continued to scale.
The OCC’s cross-sector design has drawn broad support, but with qualifications that ask whether the centre can deliver on its ambition.
Banks back the fraud centre, with conditions attached
Lloyds Banking Group confirmed it is the first private organisation to provide funding toward the OCC’s development. Liz Ziegler, the bank’s Director of Fraud, said: “It’s essential that industry, government, law enforcement, technology and telecoms companies work together – and are incentivised to share intelligence quickly, act decisively and disrupt the criminal networks behind the UK’s most common crime.”
Nationwide noted its scam checker service prevents around £300,000 in monthly customer losses, a figure that speaks to the scale of what individual institutions are already absorbing and what more consistent standards across the sector could achieve.
Elsewhere, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) endorsed the strategy’s cross-sector approach, with Executive Director Steve Smart describing it as a blueprint for partners working together at home and abroad, while noting that success depends on government, regulators, law enforcement and industry – including tech firms – all playing their part.
Pete O’Doherty, City of London Police Commissioner and National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for cyber and economic crime, said the OCC will be fed by Report Fraud, the new national crime intelligence service.
“We are building the best crime intelligence law enforcement has ever seen, which will feed the Online Crime Centre – providing crucial data to disrupt fraud and cyber crime, and shaping our messaging to the public and businesses being ruthlessly targeted.”
The telecoms industry has offered similar support. VodafoneThree reported blocking over 139 million fraudulent SMS messages in 2025 and around 1.7 million fraudulent calls daily.
Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud Prevention at Virgin Media O2, welcomed the strategy but said the intelligence infrastructure it creates is only as effective as the enforcement that follows: “Only the justice system can take down the organised criminal gangs that cause such harm. If we’re to tackle the UK’s fraud epidemic, the police must be given the necessary resources and funding to strike back.”
The real-time rails problem
For payments technology firms, the strategy lands against a specific and accelerating trend. ACI Worldwide data projects global APP fraud losses will reach $7.6bn by 2028, with the share conducted through real-time payment rails rising from 63% of losses in 2023 to an estimated 80% by that date.
Jackie Barwell, ACI’s Director of Fraud Product Management, said the OCC’s intelligence-sharing model addresses part of the problem, but that fraud prevention ultimately needs to be built into payment infrastructure directly – “through real-time monitoring, stronger authentication and smarter, more adaptive detection” – rather than applied afterwards.
Jonathan Frost, Director of Global Advisory for EMEA at BioCatch, added that co-locating bank staff may not be fast enough for instances where time-critical interventions are required.
“For bank account misuse, alerts should happen in milliseconds, not hours,” he said. He also questioned the data quality underpinning Report Fraud, warning that without meaningful validation of submitted information, the intelligence the OCC relies on could be compromised from the outset.
Funding, platforms and the limits of the strategy
The sharpest criticism, for the most part, has pooled around two areas; the scale of the investment relative to the problem, and the absence of hard accountability for social media platforms.
Silvija Krupena, Director of the Financial Intelligence Unit at RedCompass Labs, said £250m over three years, while significant, remains a fraction of a problem costing the economy more than £14bn annually. “This is not a domestic policing problem. It is a national security issue.”
Krupena also argued the strategy stops short of where it needs to go on platforms. Most fraud originates on social media, she said, and the Online Safety Act has yet to deliver meaningful consequences for platforms whose infrastructure enables it. “Until that changes, we are fighting this with one hand tied behind our back.”
