Industry Referral Guide: Supporting Law Enforcement in the Fight Against Fraud

The UK’s new Fraud Strategy marks a significant shift in how government is responding to one of the most complex and fast-evolving threats facing consumers today. For the online dating and social discovery sector, it also signals a clearer expectation that industry has a meaningful role to play, not just in protecting its own users, but in actively supporting the broader law enforcement response.

Fraud affecting our sector doesn’t exist in isolation. The organised criminal networks behind romance fraud, pig butchering scams, and financial deception are the same networks causing harm across financial services, telecoms, and beyond. They operate across borders, adapt quickly, and exploit platform vulnerabilities at scale. Tackling them requires a coordinated response, and that means industry and law enforcement must work together more proactively than ever before.

A new framework for intelligence sharing

To support this collaboration, law enforcement has developed an Industry Referral Guide, providing practical guidance on how to submit high-quality, suspect-based intelligence to two key agencies, the Online Crime Centre (OCC) and the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC).

The guide has three core aims:

• Clarifying what actionable intelligence looks like: Distinguishing between standard reporting of individual victim losses or suspicious activity through existing channels, and the proactive sharing of intelligence on suspects, criminal networks, or enabling infrastructure that presents a wider systemic or high-harm risk.
• Improving the quality and impact of referrals: Setting out the intelligence and evidential considerations that law enforcement uses to assess submissions.
• Encouraging earlier, proactive engagement: Rather than waiting for harm to reach scale, industry is encouraged to share intelligence at earlier stages of criminal activity, where disruption can prevent further losses, protect vulnerable people, and degrade organised criminal capability — including across borders.

What this means for ODDA members

The guide is designed to complement, not replace, existing regulatory obligations. It is intended for organisations that identify intelligence indicative of serious or organised fraud that may warrant attention from the National Crime Agency (NCA).

ODDA members can use the guide to:

• Assess whether identified activity meets the threshold for a referral
• Understand the types of suspect-based information that strengthen submissions
• Prepare referrals that are clear, evidentially robust, and legally compliant
• Engage constructively with law enforcement where early discussion or follow-up is appropriate

While the guide has been developed from a UK perspective, its principles are equally relevant for organisations operating internationally, supporting cross-border intelligence sharing in response to high-harm economic crime.

Our commitment

ODDA has long advocated for a collaborative relationship between our sector, regulators and law enforcement. Fraud harms real people, often when they are at their most vulnerable, and the dating and social discovery sector sits on the front line of that risk. Sharing intelligence proactively, and doing so in a way that is legally sound and operationally useful to law enforcement, is one of the most impactful things our members can do.

We encourage all members to review the Industry Referral Guide and consider how it applies to their own intelligence and compliance functions. View the guide here