It is no secret that fraud is on the up in the UK. For the year ending September 2025, the Office for National Statistics records an estimated 4.2 million fraud incidents, with a 19% increase in bank and credit account fraud, the most prevalent category.
But how does this play out in commercial litigation? This is one of the questions that prompted Stewarts and Solomonic to examine the data in our latest report: Trends in fraud litigation 2026: a litigation funding perspective. We wanted to put our day-to-day work into perspective.
My overall sense was that fraud litigation was far more common than a decade ago. The data agrees. Solomonic’s data shows that fraud judgments have risen from roughly 6% of all judgments in 2014 to almost 12% in 2025, remaining above 10% since 2020. Looking at claims issued (which offers a more ‘real-time’ view, given the inevitable lag in judgments being produced, and is less affected by early settlement), fraud claims constituted roughly 15% of all claims issued in 2025, the highest level since 2020 (the period covered by Solomonic’s claim data).
What are we to make of this? There may be causation rather than correlation in the higher levels of fraud generally, particularly banking-related fraud. Our suspicion is that much of that activity is unlikely to reach the civil courts. This is because claim values are likely to be relatively low and there are obvious difficulties in pursuing anonymous perpetrators of, for example, authorised push payment fraud. There are also other sources of reimbursement available for these types of issues, particularly under the Payment Systems Regulator’s reimbursement scheme. However, against that is the striking shift in where fraud claims are being issued. In 2025, 43% were issued in the Circuit Commercial Court or the general King’s Bench Division, which we would associate with lower-value claims. That is up from 23% in 2020, with the figures rising ever since.
Aside from the societal factors, my view is that the increase is also driven by a more sophisticated and informed litigation market. My sense is that lawyers and others, including insolvency practitioners and funders, are increasingly familiar with and willing to pursue fraud and fraud-adjacent claims. For example, it is now commonplace to expand fraud-related claims beyond the perpetrators to target intermediaries and professional services advisers. This has been enabled by the refinement of causes of action, such as Quincecare, which focuses on the duties of financial institutions when processing payments.
The development and spread of litigation funding since the 2000s may also have had a driving effect on the more valuable end of the market, particularly in litigation arising out of insolvent estates. Funding can often be critical in these types of claims. Potential claimants may lack the funds to pursue them as a result of the fraud suffered. They can also be expensive to bring: they are usually factually and procedurally complex, multi-party, multi-jurisdictional and hard-fought, including at the enforcement stage.
Looking ahead, I would make the following predictions. First, I would expect London to remain a centre for major international fraud disputes. The volume and significance of disputes heard here do not appear to have been materially affected by Brexit (or at least not yet). In recent years, there has been a string of major disputes dealing with critical issues affecting other countries.
A good example is The Republic of Mozambique v Credit Suisse International & others [2024] EWHC 1957 (Comm), where Mr Justice Knowles made the now-classic comment: ‘The parties to these proceedings came from many parts of the world. The trial was followed from many parts of the world. It was a privilege to see shared confidence in a fair trial here, in England and Wales. A lot of resources were consumed. But not unduly so: a fair trial is important to the rule of law, on which every country in the world ultimately depends and from which every country in the world ultimately benefits.’
Second, it seems inevitable that technology will play an increasingly prominent role in fraud disputes. The landscape has already changed significantly in recent years, from the introduction of cryptocurrencies to the use of deepfakes. The only general principle to be taken from this is the need to adapt.
Finally, practitioners will be monitoring from where fraud litigation may emerge in the coming years. The most interesting source may be private credit. This corner of the finance market had little public prominence until last year, when the collapse in the US of the automotive supplier First Brands and the automotive lender Tricolor (pictured) raised concerns about lending practices generally. The collapse of Market Financial Solutions in the UK is an example closer to home that has already resulted in several claims in England and a surge in national insolvency rates.
Private credit aside, any market correction due to an overvaluation of AI firms could expose fraud issues, with the recent wave of investments and dealmaking coming under closer scrutiny. In that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same – in the fraud world at least.
Charlie Mercer is a senior associate at Stewarts, London
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