Tesseract Foundational Research: Consumer Protection
A live list with no memory
The FCA warns the public about unauthorised and scam firms through a warning list. It is a genuinely useful public safety tool, and it has one structural blind spot: it shows only the firms flagged right now. There is no history, so the trend, the very thing that tells you whether the scam problem is growing, is invisible. This reconstructs that trend from the list itself.
The direction of travel
Fraud is now the most common crime in England and Wales, and investment and romance fraud sit at the sharp end of it. The FCA has been handed stronger duties to match: it gained a role in the financial-promotions regime for illegal content, and its warning list is a front-line signal of where consumer harm is emerging. Public bodies designing fraud-prevention services, and anyone building detection tooling, need to know the shape and direction of that signal. The list holds the answer but discards it daily.
The method: give the list a memory
Every live warning has its own page, and each page carries a machine-readable publication date. We took the FCA's public sitemap, which lists all 18,224 live warning pages, fetched each with a polite crawl, read its published date, and flagged clone firms from the page text. Aggregated by month, the live list becomes a warnings-published time series.
FCA warnings published per year (live pages, dated from page metadata).
What the series shows
The signal is unambiguous. FCA warnings ran at a few hundred a year through the late 2010s, then climbed steeply to 1,616 in 2022 and around 1,900 a year across 2023 to 2025, a near four-fold increase on 2019. Just under a fifth of all warnings flag clone firms, scammers cloning a genuine authorised business, one of the hardest frauds for a consumer to spot. This is the growth curve a fraud-prevention strategy is implicitly betting on, made explicit.
Honest about scope
This is a reconstruction of a live list, not a historical archive. Every record is a warning currently on the FCA site; warnings the FCA has since removed are not captured, so recent years are represented more completely than distant ones, and the early tail understates reality. It is a research reconstruction of a public signal, not an official FCA statistic. Stating that boundary is what makes the trend usable rather than misleading.
Where this goes
Captured on a schedule, the observatory becomes a genuine longitudinal record rather than a one-off snapshot, and supports emerging-threat detection: spikes in clone activity, or in a named sector, as they happen. It complements our applied work on financial vulnerability, including the Kalgera early-warning research, where the same instinct applies: harm signals are far more useful as a series than as a snapshot.
Independent, self-initiated open research reconstructed from public FCA warning-list pages. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the FCA.
Explore the observatory
Monthly time series, clone-firm share, and the reproducible crawler.
