An es­ti­mat­ed $167.37 mil­lion was lost to fraud­sters up to Ju­ly this year, ac­cord­ing to of­fi­cers of the Fraud Squad.

The fig­ure rep­re­sents a 227.2 per cent in­crease in the amount of mon­ey lost to fraud com­pared with the same pe­ri­od in 2025, when $51.15 mil­lion was re­port­ed­ly de­fraud­ed.

Po­lice said the trend was ob­served even as there was a sig­nif­i­cant drop in the num­ber of fraud re­ports made. They sug­gest­ed this could be be­cause in­di­vid­ual fraud cas­es are tar­get­ing larg­er sums of mon­ey through in­creas­ing­ly in­no­v­a­tive meth­ods of swin­dling cash and goods from vic­tims.