Cold calls – when salespeople or scammers phone the public without their consent to flog financial products – will be banned in the UK.

Some 400 investigators will be hired to hunt down fraudsters as ministers step-up efforts to bring to an end the £7,000,000,000 lost to scammers each year.

Now a blanket man on both legitimate and illegitimate cold calls selling financial products will be rolled out.

This is so ‘anyone who receives a call trying to sell them products such as cryptocurrency schemes or insurance will know it’s a scam’, the government said.

Government officials will now launch a consultation to work out what products will be covered by the ban.

As part of a new fraud strategy, ministers want to move to more intelligence-led policies, working with telecoms regulators to weed out ‘spoof’ phone numbers.

Ofcom will help make the tech needed to do this, stopping scammers from impersonating banks, telephone companies and other legitimate businesses.

With one in 15 people falling prey to fraudsters, who sometimes peddle too-good-to-be-true insurance and cryptocurrencies, ministers want victims to get their cash back.

Banks will also be given new powers to delay payments from being processed, giving them time to investigate and people to get their money back.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak said today: ‘Scammers ruin lives in seconds, deceiving people in the most despicable ways in order to line their pockets.’

‘The time has come to put the fraudsters out of business. And that’s what I’m determined to do,’ he added.

The government’s anti-fraud toolbox includes laws that require financial institutions such as banks to reimburse victims of authorised fraud.

‘SIM farms’ – mass-texting devices that hold multiple SIM cards – will be closed for good as part of the plans.

Texting scams sometimes see criminals pose as people’s ‘children’ asking their ‘parents’ to send them money. Others pretend to be delivery companies, such as Royal Mail or Hermes.

Though, most tricksters have now moved more towards online ways of scamming people out of their pound coins, according to government data.

Action Fraud, a fraud reporting portal, will soon be replaced with the ‘state-of-the-art reporting centre’, the National Fraud Squad.

While spies from intelligence-gathering agencies like MI6 could be roped in to identify overseas fraudsters, such as in phoney call centres.

But for Labour and Which?, a consumer rights watchdog, the fraud overhaul is too little, too late.

Emily Thornbury, the Labour Party’s shadow attorney general, said the government is ignoring the ‘tens of billions being lost to fraud against businesses and the government’.

The plans, she added, ‘rely on estimates of the cost of fraud to members of the public that are seven years out of date’.

Rocio Concha, the director of policy and advocacy at Which?, welcomed the government ‘at last’ acting against fraud.

‘The fight against fraud has progressed far too slowly in recent years and in particular, more action is needed to guarantee that big tech platforms take serious action against fraud,’ she said.

‘It’s positive to see the government at last producing a strategy that recognises a joined-up approach with the ambition that data is shared between industry and law enforcement is needed to tackle the UK’s fraud epidemic, which has such a devastating financial and emotional toll on the lives of victims.’

Experts from the Royal United Services Institute, a security think-tank, said there are some ‘concerning gaps’ in the government’s fraud strategy.

For one, they stressed that social media platforms need to play a bigger role in cutting fraud. While more money needs to be spent to achieve the government’s ‘ambitious’ targets, given that it amounts to ‘1% of police resources’.

‘They are certainly not enough to turn around decades of under-investment in the enforcement response to the crime affecting more British citizens than any other,’ said Helena Wood, co-head of the RUSI’s UK economic crime programme.

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