Fraud has become the defining threat of the digital age, and the UK Government has rightly recognised that meaningful progress in the fight against fraud requires effective partnership between states, law enforcement, regulators and the private sector. Its Fraud Strategy 2026–2029 and a series of high-profile international initiatives mark a clear shift towards cross-border, multi-sector engagement.
The most recent of these is the global public-private partnership on fraud, which emerged from the Global Fraud Summit held in Vienna in March 2026 with UNODC and INTERPOL, and has been entered into by ten UN Member States - including the UK, US, Australia, France, Japan and Singapore - alongside major private sector organisations including Meta, Google, Virgin Media O2, Amazon and the International Banking Federation. Structured around six core principles - shared responsibility, coordinated prevention, information sharing, victim support, innovation and education - it is a landmark initiative and a direct expression of the government's commitment. The parallel INTERPOL Global Taskforce (Operation Shadow Storm) combining the intelligence capabilities of 196 member countries to dismantle scam networks and freeze accounts, reinforces the ambition of this collective effort.
Yet for all this ambition, a critical gap persists.
The missing pillar: letting the private sector fund the fight and win back victims' losses
The six core principles of the public-private partnership reveal a clear pattern: the framework is almost entirely focused on prevention, detection and information sharing. Criminal disruption features through Operation Shadow Storm, and the government's domestic fraud strategy does acknowledge a role for enforcement via civil law claims - noting that "the Home Office is supporting law enforcement pilots focused on pursuing legal action against criminals and recovering money for victims through civil law by 2028" - but the detail is scant and the plans appear nascent. This is despite the fact that the private sector has been banging this drum for years. Ten years ago, in 2016, this firm partnered with the forward-thinking City of London Police and a global investigation and risk consulting firm to form a working group on this and to run a pilot case but the political will and appetite to do this at scale need to be reintroduced.
What is largely absent in this latest partnership framework is any structured mechanism for recovering assets on behalf of victims who have already suffered loss through the civil courts. Without recovery, justice is incomplete - and a larger cost of fighting fraud continues to fall on the public purse.
Asset recovery can be self-funding
This is where the calculus changes. Asset recovery is not only the right thing to do for victims, it is the strategically smart thing to do. Recoveries from one case can finance the next, with effective investigations generating stronger legal cases and higher prospects of further recoveries. Done well, the war on fraud pays for itself: a virtuous cycle of recovery, reinvestment and deterrence, driven by the private sector specialists with access to law enforcement's roster of cases and intelligence, at no cost to the taxpayer.
The goal must be to hit fraudsters where it truly hurts - in the pocket - depriving them of the proceeds of their crime and channelling those recoveries both to compensate victims and to fund further prevention and enforcement work.
Asset recovery and enforcement work through the civil courts is a direct route to achieving this. The toolkit available to experienced civil fraud practitioners is already there: worldwide freezing orders, disclosure orders against third parties, proprietary injunctions and cross-border enforcement mechanisms can, in the right cases, achieve outcomes that criminal enforcement cannot match in terms of speed and the effective return of funds to victims. A key benefit is the lower standard of proof: civil cases are determined on the balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable doubt, making it considerably more straightforward to secure a financial judgment against a fraudster than a criminal conviction.
The missing partner
The UK's private sector community of civil fraud and asset recovery specialists - law firms, forensic accountants, private investigators and the evolving role of litigation funders and insurance providers - brings decades of experience tackling transnational fraud, alongside the skills, technology and capital to transform the fight. They are absent from the current partnership framework other than perhaps via in-house teams in big tech, telecoms and other such companies.
The solution
To make this work, we must overcome a stubborn reluctance to allow the private sector to share in recoveries or to be financially incentivised to win cases. The state can retain overall control of case selection with public interest oversight, and the state can control flow of information from law enforcement to private sector participants. Transparent fee structures can be put in place. But the solution is straightforward: the largest share of recovery goes to the victim, a share is set aside for the state to fund further prevention and recovery work, and a share goes to reimburse the private sector specialists who funded the action and made the recovery possible. A share of something is better for the victim than a hundred per cent of nothing. Until we embrace that principle, fraudsters will continue to profit - and billions will continue to be left on the table.
The law does not need changing. The moral imperative for meaningful action is long acknowledged. The Call to Action on Combating Fraud (endorsed at the same summit) includes commitments to "return the proceeds of organized fraud" and to establish procedures to "provide access to compensation and restitution for victims". That is precisely what private sector asset recovery specialists are equipped to deliver. What is now required is the ambition and vision to integrate those specialists into the partnership model and to recognise self-funded, victim-centred and privately driven recovery action through the civil courts as a critical pillar of the global response to fraud.