Australia's banking regulator has found what it believes are potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of suspected fraudulent home loans, and warns AI tools will make faking a payslip or a bank statement easier still, as reported by RNZ. It's the kind of warning that lands with a thud in a country where mortgages are the biggest number in most households' lives.

So here's the number that reframes it. In 2025, just 828 people in New Zealand received a community sentence for fraud, deception and related offences. That is the lowest figure in the entire 27-year series, which starts in 1998 (Source: Stats NZ, community-sentences). In 1999 the same count was 3,267. We are now sentencing barely a quarter as many people to community-based penalties for fraud as we were at the turn of the century.

The shape of the decline matters more than the endpoint. Fraud sentencing wasn't on a smooth glide path down. It fell hard through the mid-2000s, bottoming at 1,539 in 2007. Then it climbed again through the years after the global financial crisis, peaking at 2,850 in 2014. Since that year it has dropped by 71 percent. Every year from 2015 to 2023 was lower than the one before it, with only a small bump in 2016.

There was one recent interruption. In 2024 the count rose to 993, up almost 13 percent on 2023's 882. If you were building a story about a fraud wave, that was your year. But 2025 wiped it out and then some, landing 17 percent below 2024.

Now the honest caveat, and it's a big one. This dataset counts community sentences, not crimes. It tells you what courts did, not what fraudsters did. A falling number is consistent with less fraud, but it is equally consistent with fewer prosecutions, more cases resolved with a different sentence type such as home detention or imprisonment, or fraud that simply never reaches a New Zealand courtroom at all. Scam calls routed through offshore call centres and synthetic loan documents generated by a chatbot don't produce a defendant standing in a Manukau district court. They produce a bank write-off. It's also worth flagging that the most recent year in any justice series can be revised as cases work through.

Which is exactly why I think the AI fraud warning and this number belong in the same article. The measurable, court-processed, someone-got-caught kind of fraud has been shrinking for a decade. The kind that worries regulators is the kind our sentencing statistics are worst at seeing.

My view: a series this long deserves more respect than it gets. Twenty-seven years of data showing fraud sentencing at a record low is a real finding about how the justice system is operating, and it should be part of any conversation about whether we're keeping pace with financial crime. If enforcement is genuinely catching less, 828 is not reassurance. It's a gap.

Either way, the next time someone tells you fraud is out of control in New Zealand, ask them which number they're using. Because the one the courts produce has been heading the other way since 2014.