20 UK forces record 163 AI-image crimes, up from 10 in 2023
TL;DR
- Twenty police forces in England and Wales logged 163 crimes tagged 'AI-generated', 'deepfake' or 'nudify' by July 2026.
- The same keywords produced 10 recorded offences in 2023, roughly a sixteen-fold rise across three years.
- The figure comes from Mark Tovey's reporting in the Telegraph, dated September 12, 2026.
The Telegraph reports, in a piece by Mark Tovey, that 'Twenty police forces in England and Wales recorded 163 crimes' tagged 'AI-generated', 'deepfake', and 'nudify' by July 2026, 'up from 10 in 2023'.
That is roughly a sixteen-fold rise over three years. Whether it reflects a genuine surge in offending, or forces catching up with the language and tagging cases better, is a question the raw count on its own does not settle.
The story lands amid a run of UK deepfake pieces our tracker has followed in recent weeks, including Nandy's commitment to legislation forcing Apple and Google to block nudify tools on children's devices.
Originally reported by telegraph.co.uk
Read the original article →Original headline: UK police forces logged 163 AI-image crimes by July 2026, up from 10 in 2023