FOI 425120

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 425120

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 5^th August 2025. Please find below the response to your request:

Q1) For the past 10 years, please share the number of reports received by the police where a victim suspects hidden spyware, AKA stalkerware, has been installed on their device by someone else, in order to track their location or monitor their activity.

Please include search results for any of the following phrases:

'stalkerware', ‘spyware’, ‘mSpy’, and ‘tracking app’.

1. a) 2015
2. b) 2016
3. c) 2017
4. d) 2018
5. e) 2019
6. f) 2020
7. g) 2021
8. h) 2022
9. i) 2023
10. j) 2024
11. k) 2025 – latest available data

Q2) Of the reports in Q1, how many of the victims were aged under 25?

1. a) 2015
2. b) 2016
3. c) 2017
4. d) 2018
5. e) 2019
6. f) 2020
7. g) 2021
8. h) 2022
9. i) 2023
10. j) 2024

Reply

West Mercia Police hold some information that has been requested.

To ensure the Force remains compliant with GDPR and MoPI regulations, certain MoPI 3 level data is automatically deleted from Force systems after a period of 6 years. As a result, the data within this FOI will only date back 6 years to reduce confusion and the misinterpretation of data as records prior to 6 years will potentially not be complete or accurate.

Q1) For the past 10 years, please share the number of reports received by the police where a victim suspects hidden spyware, AKA stalkerware, has been installed on their device by someone else, in order to track their location or monitor their activity.

Please include search results for any of the following phrases:

'stalkerware', ‘spyware’, ‘mSpy’, and ‘tracking app’.

The Question1 table is the total of all offences where any of the 4 words requested by the applicant have been included in the Incident Summary field. If a different name of spyware had been included in the Incident Summary, these offences will be omitted from the return; and as a consequence, will not appear in the Question 2 tables.

Q2) Of the reports in Q1, how many of the victims were aged under 25?

NB: There were no offences reported in 2023 where victim was aged under 25.

As individuals can be a victim of more than one offence, the reply to Question 2 has been presented as 2 tables. The first table represents the unique number of offences where a victim is under the age of 25. An individual may be a victim of more than one offence and so may appear more than once in the table (as long as they are aged under 25 at the time of the subsequent offence). The second table of Question 2 represents the number of individual victims aged under 25 who have been a victim of at least one offence whilst under the age of 25.The system calculated ‘Age at Time of Incident’ has been used to populate the Question 2 tables.