meta dict | clone_warnings int64 | clone_share_overall float64 | by_year dict | months_covered int64 | first_month string | last_month string |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
{
"source": "FCA Warning List (www.fca.org.uk/news/warnings, via public sitemap)",
"source_url": "https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/warning-list-unauthorised-firms",
"note": "Each record is a currently-live FCA warning page. Publication dates are read from each page's article:published_time. This is the live set o... | 2,827 | 0.1831 | {
"2000": 4,
"2001": 2,
"2002": 8,
"2003": 43,
"2004": 47,
"2005": 83,
"2006": 75,
"2007": 99,
"2008": 293,
"2009": 240,
"2010": 328,
"2011": 407,
"2012": 407,
"2013": 991,
"2014": 328,
"2015": 228,
"2016": 1029,
"2017": 276,
"2018": 506,
"2019": 495,
"2020": 600,
"2021": 806... | 272 | 2000-01 | 2026-07 |
FCA Warning-List Observatory
The FCA's warning list of unauthorised firms shows only the current set, with no history. This turns it into an observable time series: every live warning page, scraped from the FCA's public sitemap and dated from its own published metadata, aggregated into warnings-published-per-month.
| Live warning pages | 18,224 |
| Dated warnings | 15,437 |
| Clone-firm share | 18.3% |
| Coverage | Jan 2000 – Jul 2026 |
| Source | FCA warning list (via public sitemap) |
The finding
FCA warnings against unauthorised and scam firms have risen sharply: from around 500 a year in 2019 to roughly 1,900 a year across 2022–2025, a near four-fold increase, peaking at 1,955 in 2023. Just under a fifth of all warnings flag clone firms (scammers impersonating a genuine authorised business). The scale and trajectory of the consumer-harm signal is visible only once the live list is reconstructed as a series.
Honest about scope
Each record is a warning page that is currently live on the FCA site, dated
from its article:published_time. This is the live set observed on the scrape
date, not a historical archive: warnings the FCA has since removed are not here,
so recent years are more completely represented than distant ones. The clone
flag is derived from each page's title and text. The dataset is a research
reconstruction of a public signal, not an official FCA statistic.
Files
data/warnings_monthly.csv— monthly counts, clone counts, clone sharedata/summary.json— yearly totals, clone share, coveragedata/warnings_raw.jsonl— per-warning records (slug, dates, clone flag)scripts/fetch_warnings.py,scripts/build_timeseries.py
Reproduce
python3 scripts/fetch_warnings.py # scrape live warning pages (polite crawl)
python3 scripts/build_timeseries.py
Reconstructed from public FCA warning-list pages for research. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the FCA. Independent, self-initiated open research by Tesseract Academy.
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