Who Suffers Fraud? Understanding the Fraud Victim Landscape

Fraud is huge and can also be a very high harm offence. To get to grips with the scale and nature of victimisation for this huge and unwieldy area of crime, researchers mapped out the landscape of fraud victimisation to understand how we might break down the population of fraud victims into meaningful groups and understand what characterises these groups, as a precursor to understanding their support needs.

Drawing on data from the 2017/18 and 2018/19 Crime Survey for England & Wales (CSEW), researchers used an analytical technique to segment the population of fraud victims into a set of nine mutually exclusive groups or clusters. This is not the first time this has been done, but it is the first time it has been done with CSEW data, which encompasses the whole fraud victim population, not just those who report or who respond to a less representative survey. It is a starting point for understanding everyone’s needs, not just the needs of a minority.