The fraud strategy aims to halve fraud to £3.3bn from the current £7bn a year with greater support for intelligence agencies and police investigators to crack down on fraudulent methods used by scammers, which currently cost the UK around £7bn every year.

The development is part of the Home Office’s anti-fraud plan, which will include a £30m state of the art fraud and cybercrime reporting and analysis service to replace Action Fraud by the end of the year.

This service will provide a new reporting website, to make it easier to report fraud online.

A national fraud squad will also be set up with 400 specialist investigators across police and the National Crime Agency (NCA).