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Personation

Question for Home Office

UIN HL1311, tabled on 5 September 2017

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment have they made of the implications for crime and security in the UK of reports that there are 500 occurrences of identity theft each day and what action, if any, they plan to take to reduce identity theft.

Answered on

19 September 2017

The Government is concerned about the harms caused by identity crime and the 2016 National Strategic Assessment of Serious and Organised Crime sets out our assessment of the threats associated with identity crime.

Government are taking a number of steps to counter the increase in illegal activity around identity fraud including:

Action Fraud was established in 2014 and is the UK’s national fraud and cyber-crime reporting centre. All frauds including identity thefts should be reported to them. The City of London Police is the national policing lead for fraud and works with Action Fraud using the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau to combat identity thefts.

The Government is also concerned about the harms caused by identity crime and Action Fraud provides advice to individuals and businesses as well as support to victims.

Gov.uk Verify is a simple and secure way of verifying identity when accessing some government services online, reducing the risk of fraud no matter which service is being accessed. HMG plans to extend the Verify platform so that people have one single, common and safe way of verifying themselves to all parts of government by 2020. Government also plans to make this platform more widely available, so that people can safely verify their identity to access non-government services such as banking.

Answered by

Home Office