When we last examined the growing threat of fraud in 2017, we concluded that while the Department was the only body that could provide strategic national leadership, fraud had become too vast a problem for it to tackle on its own.37 Fraud has grown since then and the Department is still reliant on voluntary action from industry, including banks and retailers, to identify and design out opportunities for fraud in their systems. The voluntary approach government has taken to working with industry has delivered some successes. For example, the NCA told us that fraudulent websites now appeared far less frequently in paid-for advertising on search engines than they did two years ago. It told us this was due to hard negotiations by the Financial Conduct Authority to persuade Google and others to check that companies are regulated by the FCA before posting advertising from them.38