The government is set to ban cold calls on all financial products, including insurance policies, as part of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's new strategy to tackle fraud.
The plan will outlaw all cold calls made to consumers attempting to sell financial products, including legitimate sales calls, following a similar move on pensions products in 2019.
Fraud accounts for over 40% of all crime in the UK, according to the government, costing it nearly £7 billion a year. New technologies are making these scams "easier to do and harder to police" and the new initiative will help potential victims to "know it's a scam", the government stated.
As part of the initiative, a new National Fraud Squad led by the National Crime Agency and the City of London Police will be launched, which will be backed by 400 new posts designed to "bring more fraudsters to justice."
Additionally, £30 million will be invested into a new reporting centre that will be running this year to help protect individuals that have been caught out in a scam.
The government will also work with Ofcom to prevent cases of number ‘spoofing', where scammers impersonate numbers and pretend to be legitimate businesses, as well as working with tech companies to make it "as simple as possible" to report fraud online.
Around 40.8 million adults in the UK aged over 16 were targeted at least once by a suspicious call and/or message in the summer of last year, according to Ofcom.
Phil Jeynes, director of corporate strategy at Reassured, told International Investment's sister brand COVER: "Any effort to reduce fraud must be commended. Cold calling is never a good experience for customers and does nothing to improve the image of financial services in general, especially insurance which many consumers view with suspicion already.
"Many fraudsters are now targeting vulnerable people digitally these days, so this does feel a bit like too little, too late."
Pete O'Doherty, assistance commissioner at the City of London Police and the National Lead Force for Fraud, said: "The threat from fraud is significant. It harms and disrupts communities, individuals and businesses and has a massive impact on the stability of the UK.
"I feel very confident that through that new strategy, that we'll bring partners together to help protect people from fraud, to help work with industry, to disrupt platforms used by fraudsters, such as phishing platforms and telephone numbers, when they approach victims, and indeed, working across law enforcement to proactively pursue and bring to justice the most serious fraudsters."
