More than four million cases of fraud with money lost were reported in the UK last year – the equivalent of nearly eight every minute – as criminals increasingly use artificial intelligence to manipulate victims, new figures show.
The total has leaped by more than one million in two years, with almost £1.3bn stolen by scammers in 2025, according to an annual report by UK Finance. Banks said fraud posed “a national security threat” given the impact on victims and the huge sums stolen by organised criminals.
“Nearly eight fraud cases per minute reported in UK last year as AI fuels surge, with £1.3bn stolen.”
Criminals have used AI to mimic the voices of celebrities and even those of victims’ family and friends, enabling them to carry out the crime at a greater scale. People were more susceptible to being scammed – something that often happened at a vulnerable moment, even if the victim did not consider themselves vulnerable.
“The impact goes beyond financial loss; it can cause huge emotional harm, leaving victims burdened by guilt and shame, which is why we must tackle the problem at its source to protect consumers,” said Paul Davis, head of economic crime at Barclays.
Fraudsters also use fake profiles on social media and dating sites to meet, groom and ultimately steal from victims who believe they are in a loving relationship. UK Finance said examples included a fraudster marrying a victim to continue stealing money.
Kirsty Guest, a florist from North Yorkshire, was scammed out of £80,000 after meeting a man on a dating app who called himself Patrick. The relationship developed over months, but was based on a lie, because “Patrick” was a scammer using photos of another, completely innocent, man. After claiming he had been in an accident on a work trip, he tricked Kirsty into sending thousands of pounds. “[Fraudsters] are professional and they are making massive volumes of money,” she told the BBC in May. “They’re intelligent in what they’re doing.”
The first four men matched with Julie Osgood when she tried out a dating site were all potential fraudsters, the 60-year-old recently told the BBC. She spotted the problem before being tricked, but many thousands of others were not so lucky.
The enormous scale of the problem could only be tackled if tech companies stepped up monitoring and security of their platforms, the banking trade body said. Experts believe the majority of scams are unreported, so do not even register in the statistics.