A company director was jailed this week for a £7m airline parts fraud. But here's the question nobody's asking: how many fraudsters actually stop after getting caught?

The answer is chilling. 1,769 people convicted of fraud reoffended within two years of their original sentence. That's up a staggering 37% from 1,293 just over a decade ago. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Proven Reoffending -- proven-reoffending_jan24_mar24_3_monthly -- B3_(3_monthly))

Think about what this means. While politicians focus on knife crime and burglary, fraud has quietly become Britain's most addictive criminal behaviour. These aren't one-off opportunists. They're repeat offenders who see prison as a temporary inconvenience, not a deterrent.

The surge tells a bigger story about how crime has evolved. Traditional crimes like theft require physical presence, creating risk. Fraud can be committed from a laptop in a coffee shop. The barriers to entry are low, the potential rewards enormous, and apparently, the likelihood of going straight afterwards is minimal.

Consider the maths. If nearly 1,800 convicted fraudsters are reoffending within two years, and that number is climbing by more than a third, we're not just failing to rehabilitate white-collar criminals. We're actively training them.

This isn't about sympathy for fraudsters. It's about recognising that our justice system was built for a different type of crime. Lock up a burglar, and they can't break into houses from their cell. Send a fraudster to prison, and they spend their time networking with other financial criminals, learning new techniques, and planning their next scheme.

The 37% increase suggests something fundamental has shifted. Perhaps it's the digitalisation of finance, making fraud easier to commit and harder to trace. Perhaps it's that fraud sentences are too lenient to matter. Perhaps it's that we're catching more fraud but not preventing it.

What's certain is that the traditional approach isn't working. While that airline parts fraudster serves his sentence, 1,769 others like him have already been released and chosen to reoffend. The director might be making headlines, but the data shows he's part of a growing pattern we're barely addressing.

Until we acknowledge that fraud isn't just theft with a computer, it's a different category of crime entirely, these numbers will keep climbing. The question isn't whether more fraudsters will reoffend. It's how many more victims they'll create while we pretend prison alone is the solution.