The Department’s reliance on voluntary charters does not produce a strong enough incentive for industry to rapidly improve its response to fraud. Industry sectors, such as banking, technology and telecoms, have a vital role to play in designing out opportunities for committing fraud. However, not enough has changed since we last looked at this five years ago. The Department is still reliant on voluntary action from industry, leading to inconsistencies for victims. For example, only around 50% of victims of authorised push payment fraud, where the victim is pressurised to authorise a payment, get their money back. The Department admits that inconsistency arises because reimbursement is on a voluntary basis and is looking at introducing mandatory reimbursement. It is possible to secure impacts through voluntary charters. For example, the Department asserts that persuading telecoms companies to block scam texts sources led to more than a 90% reduction on some operators. However, we are concerned that progress by these means is often difficult and slow, exposing people to the threat of fraud in the meantime. Recommendation 6: The Department should set out, as part of its Treasury Minute response, how voluntary charters will contribute to its fraud strategy, including what changes it expects to see as a result of the charters, by when these will be achieved and what action it will take if they are not.