The UK's national fraud-reporting service has a new name and a new platform. Here is what actually changed, what didn’t, and what to do — in the right order — when you have been scammed.
Published 22 May 2026 · ScamSupport research · ~9 minute read
If you have been scammed in the UK and gone looking for where to report it, you may have found that the name you expected no longer exists. Action Fraud — the national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime since 2013 — has been retired. In its place is a service called Report Fraud, which began rolling out in December 2025 and moved to full national operation through early 2026.
For most people the change will look like a new website and a new name. But it is worth understanding properly, because the switch changes very little about the thing victims most want changed — and understanding what reporting does and does not do is the difference between wasting an afternoon and actually getting your money back. This article explains what Action Fraud was, why it was replaced, what Report Fraud is, and — the part that matters — exactly what to do, and in what order, when you have been scammed.
Action Fraud launched in 2013 as the single national point for reporting fraud and cybercrime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Scotland has always reported through Police Scotland.) It ran under the City of London Police — the national lead force for fraud — and reports fed into a central intelligence function, where they were assessed and a fraction were passed to local police forces for investigation.
That was the design. The reality became one of the most criticised public services in the country. Fraud grew into the most common crime in England and Wales — by some measures more than a third of all recorded offences — while the resources to investigate it never grew to match. The result was a service that took in enormous volume and could act on very little of it. Victims routinely reported scams and heard nothing back. Only a small minority of reports were ever passed to a local force, and fewer still led to an investigation.
The low point was public. An undercover investigation in 2019 found that call-centre staff had been trained in ways that left victims with a misleading impression of how likely their case was to be looked at. Confidence in the service never fully recovered. A replacement was commissioned: a new digital service built to handle the volume better and, just as importantly, to treat the people reporting as victims of a crime rather than as rows in a database.
Report Fraud is that replacement. It went live in December 2025 and moved to full national operation through early 2026. In day-to-day terms:
That last point is the intent, and it is the right intent. Whether Report Fraud delivers it is something that can only be judged over a full year of operation, not from a launch announcement. The honest position in mid-2026 is that the front door has been rebuilt; whether the building behind it works differently is the open question.
When you submit a report — online or by phone — the process is broadly this:
This is the part no rebrand can change on its own. The volume of fraud reported in the UK vastly exceeds the number of cases the police have the capacity to investigate. A better website makes reporting less painful and the intelligence cleaner; it does not create detectives. If your expectation walking in is that filing a report will lead to someone investigating your case and recovering your money, that expectation will, in most cases, be disappointed — and that was just as true under Action Fraud.
Because reporting still does real work — just not the work most people assume.
Reporting is the civic step. It is worth ten minutes. It is simply not the step that gets your money back — and confusing the two is the most common, and most costly, mistake victims make.
Report Fraud is a reporting and intelligence service. It is not a recovery service, it does not refund anyone, and it does not contact your bank for you. Money recovery runs on a completely separate — and much faster — track, and the clock on that track starts the moment the money leaves your account, not the moment you file a report.
If you have lost money, the single most important call is to your bank, immediately. Most UK current accounts can be reached for fraud by dialling 159 — a secure short number that connects you straight to your bank’s fraud line and cannot itself be spoofed. The bank can try to halt or recall a transfer while it is still moving, and under the UK’s authorised-push-payment reimbursement rules it must consider refunding many scam losses. None of that is triggered by a Report Fraud submission. It is triggered by you contacting the bank.
If you take one thing from this article, take this sequence. The order is the point.
Report Fraud is step two on that list, deliberately. It matters — but it sits behind the bank, because the bank is where recovery actually happens. For the full walkthrough, see our guide on how to report a scam in the UK.
Retiring the Action Fraud name was the right call. The brand had become a byword for being ignored, and a service victims do not trust is one they do not use — which starves the very intelligence picture that fraud disruption depends on. A clean restart, if it genuinely makes reporting less demoralising, has value on its own terms.
But a new platform is a new front door, not a new house. The structural problem — that reported fraud vastly outruns the capacity to investigate it — is a question of resources and priorities, and no website solves it. The real measure of Report Fraud will not be how it looks at launch. It will be whether, a year from now, a meaningfully larger share of reports has led to something happening. That is worth watching, and worth holding the service to.
Until then, treat reporting as what it is: the civic step, genuinely worth doing, that protects the next person and gives you the paperwork you need. And treat your bank as what it is: the place recovery actually happens. Get the order right, move quickly, and you give yourself the best chance the system allows.