Economic crime has fundamentally changed. No longer confined to discrete categories or single sectors, today's threats represent a complex, interconnected ecosystem that challenges traditional prevention approaches.
As Matt Horne (Director of Intelligence and Investigations at Clue Software) observed on a recent webinar, economic crime now encompasses fraud, money laundering, bribery, corruption, sanctions evasion, insider threats, and cryptocurrency exploitation - and these threats no longer operate in isolation. Increasingly, we're seeing organised crime groups potentially collaborating with hostile state actors, whilst insider threats amplify risk across the economic crime landscape.
The Scale of the Challenge
The statistics paint a concerning picture. With millions of fraud incidents occurring annually, the National Crime Agency estimates that 86% goes unreported - creating a significant intelligence blind spot that hampers our collective response. This underreporting fundamentally undermines our ability to understand and combat the full scale of the threat.
Modern fraud is increasingly cyber-enabled, industrialised, and transnational, making detection and prevention considerably more complex than traditional approaches allowed for.
Technology as Both Enabler and Accelerant
The threat landscape in 2025 is characterised by sophisticated enablers. Fran Stringer (Director, PWC) highlighted how artificial intelligence, voice cloning, malvertising, and large-scale "fraud farms" are powering multiple fraud types simultaneously - from hyper-personalised phishing attacks targeting consumers, to sophisticated authorised push-payment scams aimed at corporates.
A Strategic Threat to National Interests
The implications extend beyond financial loss. Economic crime undermines public trust in institutions, weakens economic resilience, and in some cases directly supports adversarial states. This elevation of economic crime to a national security concern requires a fundamentally different strategic response from public sector organisations.
The Regulatory Response: Failure to Prevent Fraud
The new Failure to Prevent (FtP) fraud offence, which came into force last month, represents a significant shift in how organisations must manage economic crime risk. Organisations can now be held criminally liable for inadequate prevention procedures - forcing a step change in approach across all sectors, from construction to retail.
This regulatory evolution demands stronger fraud controls, robust governance frameworks, and comprehensive training programmes. Whilst the full impact remains to be seen - particularly as AI usage increases - the hope is that this proactive regulatory stance will drive down future economic crime threats.
Implications for Counter Fraud Professionals
For counter fraud professionals, the message is clear: economic crime requires a strategic, cross-cutting response. Success requires moving beyond siloed approaches to embrace:
- Cross-sector collaboration to address threats that don't respect organisational boundaries
- Intelligence sharing to overcome the reporting gap and build comprehensive threat pictures
- Technology-informed defences that focus on the systems and tools facilitating crime rather than individual fraud types
- Governance frameworks that meet evolving regulatory expectations
- National security awareness recognising economic crime's role in supporting hostile actors
The threat is fast-moving, interconnected, and strategic. Our response must be equally sophisticated.
Jessica Kimbell, GovNet
