Counterfeit Currency Offences and Arrests 2021 to 2023

Publication Number: 1557 

FOI Number: 20720

Information Request 

Please supply the following information fo each of the last three calendar years (1st January 2021 - 31st December 2021, 1st January 2022 - 31st December 2022 and 1st January 2023 - 31st December 2023):

Q1) How many reports did your force receive of counterfeit money being used to pay for goods/services?

Q2) In relation to Q1, how many arrests were made?

FOI Duty   

First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request  

Second Duty – See below  

Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request  

Exemption - Section 12(1)  

Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA  

Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to provide a comprehensive data report to meet this request as the data is not available in a readily extractable format, nor is it held on a central log. 

With regard to Question 1, Essex Police is unable to report on the number of reports of counterfeit currency being specifically used to pay for goods or services between 2021 and 2023 as this is not readily extractable information from our crime recording system. To attempt to answer this question would require a manual review of each counterfeit currency offence recorded in the desired time period to ascertain whether a specific attempt to pay for goods or services was recorded in the investigation notes, extracting any relevant information found and collating it into a bespoke report.

To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would additionally qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests. 

Duty to assist – When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2)), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following 

Essex Police can however provide the numbers of recorded counterfeit currency related offences and arrests between 2021 and 2023: 

Caveat: The information is correct as at 09 September 2024

Notes

- The offence figures are the numbers of offences recorded under the following Home Office classification codes in relation to counterfeit currency:

• 061/24 Making counterfeit coin or note
• 061/25 Pass etc. counterfeit coin or note as genuine
• 061/26 Possess counterfeit coin or note
• 061/27 Possess materials or dies to make counterfeit coin or note
• 061/28 Reproduce British currency note or make imitation coins

- The arrest figures are the numbers of arrests made under the Forgery & Counterfeiting Act 1981 (sections 14-19).

Counterfeit Currency Offences by Year – 2021 to 2023

Arrests Relating to Counterfeit Currency Offences by Year – 2021 to 2023

Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.