The other problem is that this statistic is nearly meaningless. If I run a bank scam, I might have 500k victims, but it won't take as many police to investigate as 500k rapes or murders or kidnappings would. This is comparing apples with oranges.
Practically what happens if you're defrauded is your local police force will direct you to Action Fraud (https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/) run by the City of London, who will note it down for "intelligence" but otherwise appear to do nothing whatsoever. Which is not too surprising - according to Wikipedia they have 80 staff.
Yeah, I'm somewhat familiar. I worked at a (fairly technological) UK bank, where we did investigations into scams like this. There's really not much that can be done about most of these scams, other than taking your multivitamins to prevent cognitive decline.
Most of these scammers are outside the UK, in India or Africa somewhere. Those countries do put a lot of resources into capturing 'Yahoo boys' and the like, but it's sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack. I think the more realistic solution is to educate people so they don't fall for some of these preposterously blatant scams.
Is it really the case that not much can be done, or just that the resources aren't there to do it? Your average scammer isn't a criminal genius. You'd think a bit of good old fashioned police work would suffice in a lot of cases – if there were actually some police officers available to do that.
We worked a fair bit with the police, and I never got the impression we were frustrated with their inaction. They devoted a lot of resources to it, but it's part of the nature of the beast that there just don't need to be as many officer hours per victim as there would be for a rape or murder.
