The UK government’s new national fraud strategy has come under fire for being too weak to tackle soaring levels of criminality.

The strategy, announced on Wednesday, aims to cut fraud by 10 per cent by the end of the current parliament. It includes banning cold calls on all financial products and outlawing so-called “SIM farms”, which are used by criminals to send thousands of spam texts at once, as well as increasing the role of the intelligence community in disrupting overseas criminals.

“The publication of this strategy marks a fundamental shift in our approach to tackling fraud,” said home secretary Suella Braverman. “This strategy sets out a plan to stop fraud at source and pursue those responsible wherever they are in the world.”

But experts warned that the measures lacked ambition and would not do enough to cut fraud, which accounted for more than 40 per cent of all crime in England and Wales by December and cost the UK at least £6.8bn in 2019-2020.

Proposals to force tech companies to pay compensation to victims of online financial scams, for example, have been dropped in favour of a voluntary “online fraud charter”, which the government said it would agree with the companies this summer.

Helena Wood, co-head of UK economic crime programme at think-tank RUSI, said the watered down measures fell short. “Unless you start doing something a bit more hard line to bring these companies to the table, they won’t take any action.

“We’d be hoping to see the strategy consider a mandatory levy on social media and tech companies to pay for the police response to fraud — what I’d liken to a ‘polluter pays’ principle,” she added.

She also warned that the addition of 400 new specialist fraud roles spread across police forces and the National Crime Agency was insufficient to deal with domestic crime.

“There are fraudsters who operate within the UK and we could do a lot more to bring these people to justice,” said Wood. “Four hundred extra officers is not enough.”

Matt Hammerstein, chief executive of Barclays UK, warned that Britain was “losing the war” against scams and needed stronger regulation of online platforms to help tackle criminality.

“Our data shows that 77 per cent of scams originate on tech platforms, including social media sites and online marketplaces,” he said. “Without a legislative or regulatory framework for this sector — as we rightly have for banks — we risk continuing to not treat fraud and scams with the seriousness they require.”

Richard Cannon, partner at Stokoe Partnership Solicitors, said the new enforcement measures were not ambitious enough to tackle the main sources of criminal fraud, such as the largely unregulated world of bitcoin and other digital assets.

“Outlawing cold calls peddling fraudulent crypto schemes is a drop in the ocean compared with the fraudulent investment schemes that proliferate online, which crypto fraudsters favour for attracting victims,” he said.

There was also disappointment that the government had not created a single authority to centralise resources for combating fraud, which is currently handled by 19 government departments and 42 police forces.

“This needs focus. Creating a single scams authority with effective powers of direction will make the difference and enable us all to get ahead of the scammers,” said Simon Miller, policy and communications director at Stop Scams UK, whose members include big banks, telecoms companies and major technology platforms.