The Fraud Act 2006 - A Decade of Deception?

This chapter draws on PhD research to give an overview of the use to which the Fraud Act 2006 has been put in the first ten years after its enactment. Data obtained via an analysis of reported case law has enabled a retrospective insight into academic concerns expressed at the Fraud Act 2006’s inception. These concerns – asked here in the form of three questions - were whether the Fraud Act 2006 would cope with the use of technology to carry out financial crime? If the revelation of the fraud offence as a conduct crime - making the offence potentially inchoate – would alter its use by prosecutors, and whether the criticisms of the use of dishonesty as a mens rea requirement in the new offence would lead to unwelcome jurisprudential complexity? This chapter explains the difficulty in quantifying the use of the Fraud Act 2006 using official figures, and the basis of the research in Freedom of Information requests from police forces in England and Wales. The responses to these requests reveals a much more modest use of the Fraud Act 2006 than the public might be led to expect via media sources. A study of the facts and outcomes of case law in the last ten years where the Fraud Act 2006 was involved gives answers to the questions posed above which are both surprising and reassuring.