Strengthening the Law Enforcement Response to Fraud: A Conversation with the City of London Police

Detective Superintendent Oliver Little, Lead Force Operations Room National Coordination at the City of London Police, spoke at Counter Fraud 2026 in a fireside chat about the national fraud enforcement landscape - what is working, where the gaps are, and how law enforcement is trying to get ahead of a threat that continues to grow in scale and sophistication. Here is a summary of what DSU Little said:

A national coordination role

The City of London Police is the National Lead Force for fraud in England and Wales - giving it a coordination remit that extends far beyond its geographical patch. DSU Little's role sits at the heart of that national function, spanning intelligence, tactical and strategic coordination, and national standards. His two intelligence teams work with partners across policing and government to drive proactive fraud investigation. His coordination functions - one tactical, one strategic - focus on joining up operations across forces and pushing every one of the 43 police forces to raise their game on fraud. That is not, he was clear, the City of London telling others how to do it. It is about identifying what works best across the network and driving those standards upward collectively.

Operation Henhouse: Concentrated effort, public messaging, deterrence

DSU Little described Operation Henhouse - now in its fifth year - as one of the most significant structural shifts in the national fraud enforcement calendar. Every police force, every region, the Insolvency Service, the National Crime Agency, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Serious Fraud Office and Trading Standards now coordinate activity in February to scale up what they do on fraud simultaneously. One operation in the most recent Henhouse seized £10 million from fraudsters in a single action.

The purpose is threefold. First, it generates enforcement activity at a scale that individual forces or agencies could not achieve alone. Second, it creates a concentrated media moment that allows policing to demonstrate publicly that fraud is being taken seriously - pushing stories into local publications and social media channels where ordinary people are paying attention. Third, it carries a deterrence message: there is no safe month to commit fraud.  DSU Little was candid that the early years of Henhouse faced resistance, with questions about whether it was arbitrary. The results have answered that question.

Being strategic: Targeting the kill chain

DSU ittle was direct about the limits of enforcement capacity. The UK will not arrest its way out of the fraud problem. The prison system and law enforcement resources do not allow for an approach modelled on US incarceration rates, nor would it necessarily produce better outcomes if they did. The response has to be data-led, targeted and strategic.

That means focusing on what he called the 'kill chain' - the point at which fraudsters are sharing methods, acquiring compromised data and building the infrastructure for attacks. Disrupting that preparatory phase, before it translates into tens of thousands of victims, is far more effective than investigating individual cases after the harm is done.

In one example to illustrate this approach,  DSU Little described an Operation where law enforcement took control of a web platform's hosting infrastructure and used it to sow doubt among criminal users, undermining confidence in the platform until it collapsed under its own mistrust. No arrests needed - the service simply went out of business because its users no longer felt safe using it.

Report Fraud: a significant investment in the victim journey

 DSU ittle welcomed the launch of Report Fraud - the successor to Action Fraud - as a meaningful step forward. Unlike its predecessors, which were built and then left largely unchanged, Report Fraud is designed to evolve. The public-facing reporting journey has been trauma-informed, with the system adapting how it communicates depending on the vulnerability of the person using it. For  DSU Little, the test is whether the system would work well for someone like his elderly mother-in-law - whether it could draw out the right information sensitively and turn it into actionable intelligence. He described it as a good platform to build on, and highlighted its potential to generate richer demographic data on victims, that can be used to target prevention messages for the most vulnerable populations more precisely.

Collaboration: Get everyone around the table

On collaboration,  DSU Little's advice was grounded in practical experience. The regional Protective Economic Crime Teams have been one of the most effective structural developments in recent years - professionals working across jurisdictions without the traditional tendency to push cases across county boundaries. The network functions because the people in it have built trust over time and approach fraud as a shared problem rather than a jurisdictional one.

He gave a vivid example of what genuine cross-agency collaboration looks like. An investigation into payment diversion fraud identified that secondary money laundering was running through community supermarkets. Policing alone could have gone down that route and got lost in it. Instead, by bringing in Trading Standards, the Food Standards Agency, Immigration Enforcement and HMRC, they ran a multi-agency sweep through those businesses - generating disruption on food hygiene, immigration and financial grounds simultaneously. The fraud investigation unlocked a far wider intervention.  DSU Little's philosophy is that treating a fraudster as only a fraudster is blinkered. Understanding the full enterprise risk they present brings more partners, more powers and better outcomes.

His honest reflection on collaboration was that policing has sometimes made it harder than it needed to be by prioritising its own objectives, rather than approaching partners as equals. The shift towards genuine partnership - contributing to a collective effort rather than directing it - has been a significant cultural change, and one that is still developing.

Technology: Industrialised attacks and a strategic response

 DSU ittle acknowledged that technology has transformed the fraud threat - enabling high-volume, industrialised attacks where even a small conversion rate is enough to make criminal operations lucrative. AI-generated voice cloning, synthetic identities and scaled phishing infrastructure are all real and growing concerns. But he pushed back against a purely pessimistic view. The forthcoming fraud strategy's three pillars - enforcement, disruption at scale, and public education - reflect a response that is evolving to match the threat. Significant investment is going into capability that draws signals intelligence from banks and telecoms providers alongside law enforcement, with the aim of disrupting attacks before they reach victims at scale.

Advice to counter fraud professionals

Asked what he would say to people building careers in counter fraud,  DSU Little's answer was honest. Most of his strengths, he said, have come from getting things badly wrong and using the experience as motivation to improve. He encouraged people earlier in their careers not to sit on questions in meetings out of intimidation - and placed the responsibility on leaders to create the conditions where everyone feels able to speak. The job of leadership, he said, is to draw out everyone's contribution and then own the decision and the risk. That culture, applied consistently, is what makes fraud teams effective.