Britain’s replacement service for its failed national reporting center for fraud and financially motivated cybercrime, Action Fraud, is to be named Report Fraud when it is publicly launched later this year, according to multiple sources.

The new system is intended to win back public trust over law enforcement’s approach to what has become the most common crime across the country, with estimated costs to the economy of billions of pounds every year, alongside hundreds of victims losing their life savings. Official statistics show incidents grew 31% in the year ending this March, despite the fear that more than 80% of frauds go unreported.

Although the public-facing portal for Report Fraud has faced multiple delays in going live, its back-end crime and intelligence system, based on Palantir’s Foundry platform — which has not previously been reported — has been operational since last November, according to City of London Police.

The delays have been driven by caution against launching an imperfect service. Nik Adams, the deputy commissioner leading the project, told MPs previously: “Given the history of Action Fraud, we want to absolutely get right the new system before we launch it, because nothing [would be] worse ... [than] if people lose confidence in it from the outset.”

Unlike its predecessor, Report Fraud has been designed so that it will collect evidence for police investigations. The likely millions of reports of fraud that will be submitted to it are beyond what can be manually assessed by police officers, so the Foundry platform will automatically analyze and compare the range of evidence people contribute, allowing the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) to spot patterns and send intelligence packages for further investigation.

Jonathan Frost, who formerly worked at the NFIB for more than a decade and is now a director at fraud prevention business BioCatch, praised Report Fraud “for the fact that, from day one, this has had an analytical aspect to it.”

Frost said the “fundamentals of aggregating fraud complaints is solid, no question,” but that “the problem comes when you have to formulate a strategy regarding what that data tells you. The proof of the pudding will be in the translation of the aggregate data into a strategy to address a significant serious and organised crime threat.”

A spokesperson for City of London Police said a “fully integrated approach has been developed, including intelligence collection, research and analysis, and intelligence development” to align with intelligence standards used across British law enforcement.

“The new service can ingest, analyse and publish information faster and at scale, to help UK police forces better prepare for the ever-evolving fraud and cyber crime threat. It encompasses a greater number of data partners, allowing for more accurate and insightful intelligence products,” added the spokesperson.

The inclusion of data from partner organizations, potentially from financial services and online platforms monitoring fraud campaigns, is considered critical. Frost explained that the challenge in tackling fraud was that “when push comes to shove, the real opportunity for citizens to be protected sits with tech, telco and financial services.”

“There are only two ways out of this: reduce the financial gains made by criminals — reduce their incentives — and also to push up their costs,” said Frost. “And the two domains in which you can push up their costs are telco and tech, by creating lots of friction for them and stopping them getting access to victims.”

“The real question for Report Fraud,” he said, “is how it’s going to support, encourage and require other parts in that kill chain to do their part.”

The City of London Police spokesperson said Report Fraud's intelligence production capability aims to deliver “targeted and timely advice, including information on the latest threats” enabling the whole ecosystem to ”block and disrupt crime through providing real-time information to those organisations who can deter and disrupt fraudulent websites, bank accounts, and other activities which we know are enabling criminality.”

Action Fraud’s replacement had been raised as part of the government’s Fraud Strategy in 2023, and a new expanded strategy is expected to be launched later this year. Including capital expenditure and running costs until 2030, it is expected to cost more than £212 million ($283 million).

It comes as the British government has introduced new duties on technology companies to protect their users from fraud which came into effect this March.