What emerging trends in financial scams do you find most concerning today, and how do you anticipate scam tactics will evolve over the next five years?
One of the most concerning trends is the industrialisation of scams – where criminal networks operate with the scale, speed, and sophistication of legitimate businesses. Members report a rise in impersonation scams and scams that exploit real-time payments and social engineering.
It is anticipated that there will be a greater use of AI by fraudsters, to personalise attacks, automate phishing, and mimic trusted voices. This will demand a shift from reactive detection to proactive, intelligence-led disruption.
But the international dimension of fraud is the biggest challenge. Much fraud has an international aspect – over 70% – and this makes it much harder to tackle. Members report they know where much of the fraud comes from, right down to the building in some cases.
We need to be able to share data that indicates suspicious activity, between industry organisations, as quickly as possible, so the whole ecosystem can react. We need to do that in a way that is compliant with data protection, has consumer protection at its heart, and is also designed to be agile – fraudsters won’t stop, neither can industry.
Your organisation promotes cross-sector data sharing between tech, telecoms, and financial services to combat financial crime. What unique strengths does each sector bring to the table, and why is this tri-sector approach critical to disrupting scam operations?
Each sector holds a vital piece of the puzzle. Telecoms can identify suspicious calls and SMS patterns; tech platforms can detect malicious content, fake accounts, and fraudulent URLs; and financial institutions can spot unusual transaction behaviours. Financial institutions are also the place where most fraud is reported – so they have the most up-to-date information on what trends are happening.
No one industry sector – telecoms, online tech, or finance – has sight of the whole scam journey, so no one sector can always see what is harmful and what is not. Scams traverse all three sectors, so unless we collaborate, we only ever see part of the picture, leaving fraudsters to flourish in the gaps.
What does effective collaboration across industries look like in practice, and how does your organisation successfully turn organisations’ competing interests into aligned action?
Stop Scams UK is a non-profit membership organisation that brings together businesses from the three sectors most affected by scams – financial services, technology, and telecoms – to collaborate on fraud prevention. Our mission is to stop scams at the source by facilitating cross-sector cooperation, sharing intelligence, and developing systemic solutions to fraud.
Effective collaboration means creating a trusted, neutral space where members can share challenges, co-design solutions, and act collectively. At Stop Scams UK, we convene workshops, senior policy roundtables, technical working groups and data sharing pilots that focus on shared outcomes rather than individual interests. We build alignment by focusing on consumer harm reduction, reputational risk, and regulatory readiness – areas where all sectors have a stake
With so many warnings and alerts, and scam tactics constantly evolving, how can we cut through the noise to deliver clear, unified messages that truly have an impact with the public?
With the government’s fraud strategy currently in development, we have organised a workshop to bring together our members to discuss exactly this question. It will have a focus on the next iteration of ‘Stop, Think, Fraud’ and what they would like it to address in the future.
We regularly bring together our members’ comms teams, from across all three sectors, to help unite telecom, tech, and financial services sectors in pooling their expertise and insights, ensuring a unified front against scams.
In 2023, we helped set up BBC Scam Safe, through which we connect the BBC with members. This was a huge campaign across the country and has grown each year thereafter – watch out for the next one November 2025.
How is AI shifting the fight against scams from reactive detection to proactive prevention? What responsibility do regulated firms have to deploy these tools ethically, and what safeguards should be in place to build trust?
AI holds great promise and will enable early detection of scam patterns, predictive risk scoring, and real-time content moderation. It will speed up the analysis of transaction patterns and customer behaviour and help detect phishing and impersonation attempts across platforms. This will help enable industry to better protect millions of customers from fraud.
Helen Fairfax-Wall is the Chief Policy and Communications Officer at Stop Scams UK. A digital policy specialist with 20 years of experience, Helen has worked on some of the largest public shifts in digital and data. She delivered national campaigns to build consumer trust and adoption of the UK Government’s first wave of online public services with Directgov. Under the coalition Government, Helen delivered global policy digital campaigns for Number 10 including G8 Dementia and the Olympics. Later at the Government Digital Service (GDS) as Head of National Transformation, Helen led teams across UK regions to train and apply digital best practice. During the Covid pandemic, Helen chaired the Four Nations Digital Data Sharing group to negotiate and achieve legal certainty on digital insight, data and coding across the devolved administrations. The work was commended as delivering a consistency of digital services across the four nations. In 2022, Helen joined the consumer association Which? as Head of Digital and Fraud Policy, where she led a dedicated team specialising in policy areas of digital connectivity, fraud, data, and digital identity. In 2024, Helen joined Stop Scams UK with a strong belief that through cross-sector collaboration, the fight against online fraud can be won.
