Fraud up 20% as online crime soars but overall offences are at a 31 year low Increase in fraud is driven by online scams Since its peak in 1995, crime has more than halved Reported frauds have soared by more than 20 per cent in a year, figures show. Driven by online scams, fraud crimes in England and Wales reported to police have rocketed nearly 60 per cent in five years. However, overall crime is still falling. Over the past 12 months the total fell 7 per cent to 8.5million offences - a 31-year low. Driven by online scams, fraud crimes in England and Wales reported to police have rocketed nearly 60% in five years Since its peak in 1995, crime has more than halved. Ministers welcomed the fall, but experts warned that the published figures were likely to underestimate the true scale of fraud across the country. In the year to June, 230,335 fraud offences were reported to the police and Action Fraud - a new national fraud reporting centre. That represents an increase of 21 per cent compared with a year earlier. Fraud has increased 59 per cent from the 145,032 crimes recorded in the year to March 2008. It means four people in every thousand now fall victim each year. Nigel Williams, a statistician at the Civitas think-tank, praised improvements in the recording of fraud but warned: "Where a scam is too obvious to succeed or too clever to be detected it will not show up in the official statistics." Meanwhile, separate figures published yesterday show there were more than 316,000 bank and payment-related frauds, according to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.