More than seven million of the newly counted offences are being committed a year, according to the first official estimates provided by the Office for National Statistics.
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Another new piece of research from the ONS showed there were a further 2.1 million offences under the Computer Misuse Act – mainly attempts to access confidential information.
The data from the Crime Survey of England and Wales also revealed that overall crime has fallen by 8% from previous year with an estimated 6.5 million offences.
Today’s startling figures follow a controversial report out yesterday that said victims of cyber crime should be “low priority” if they fail to take security steps.
“The profile of cases covered by the CSEW cover the full spectrum of harm or loss”. Almost 600,000 offences were referred to NFIB, including 237,494 offences reported by victims to Action Fraud (the UK’s national fraud reporting centre), 266,701 referrals from Cifas (a UK-wide fraud prevention service) and 95,489 cases from FFA United Kingdom (that represents the United Kingdom payments industry).
The methodology of the survey has provoked scepticism from many quarters, as it was based on “a large scale field trial of 2,000 households” during the summer of 2015.
Without the inclusion of cybercrime, the general crime rate would be down 8%, the ONS stats showed.
An update on the plans published earlier this year by the ONS said: “Whilst the consistency of the survey questions over time has been one of its great strengths, with the rise of the internet there have been concerns that the survey has failed to keep up with the changing nature of crime; the internet provides not only new means of committing established crimes, but also opportunities to undertake new types of crime”.
He said: ‘The increase in the reporting of sexual offences is something that we welcome.
“We are at the forefront of global efforts to bring official crime statistics into the digital age”.
The addition of the 5.1m online fraud offences to the crime survey figure of 6.5 million offences leads to a headline figure of 11.6m estimated criminal incidents compared with the 6.8m estimate for the year to June 2014.
As the minister in charge of policing and crime, Mike Penning could be expected to know how to protect himself from criminals. But Jack Dromey, Labour’s policing spokesperson, said the numbers show that crime isn’t falling, but shifting online.
And there were 33,987 recorded violent crimes against the person, up from 21,981.
“The Office for National Statistics has been clear that this rise reflects improvements in recording practice, rather than an increase in itself and this is something we welcome”, he continued.
On average one in 12 adults is a victim of fraud and one in 22 is a victim of cyber fraud, the figures show.
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The Crime Survey suggests a 25% increase in violence, with murders at their highest level for four years.
