How many CyberTipline referrals has the NCA received from NCMEC each year for the last five years?
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Executive summary
The reporting available does not disclose how many CyberTipline referrals the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) — or any single foreign law‑enforcement agency — received from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) for each of the last five years; public NCMEC materials describe overall CyberTipline volumes and referral practices but do not publish per‑country or per‑agency annual referral tallies [1] [2] [3]. The record therefore supports describing system‑level totals and referral practices but cannot produce the NCA‑specific yearly counts without additional, agency‑level data requests to NCMEC or the NCA [1] [2].
1. What the CyberTipline publishes: huge aggregate volumes, not agency‑by‑agency breakdowns
NCMEC’s public reporting focuses on the scale and characteristics of CyberTipline activity — for example, NCMEC reported 20.5 million CyberTipline reports in 2024 and about 36.2 million in 2023, with roughly 32 million reports in 2022 — but these summaries present aggregate report counts and thematic breakdowns rather than a roll‑up of how many referrals were sent to any particular foreign policing body such as the NCA [4] [3] [2].
2. How NCMEC defines and routes “referrals,” and why that matters to counting
NCMEC defines a “referral” as a CyberTipline report that contains sufficient information for law enforcement action — typically user details, imagery and a possible location — and then routes those referrals to appropriate domestic and international enforcement partners; this routing process means referrals are filtered, prioritized and sometimes augmented before transmission, making a straight numeric mapping from incoming CyberTipline reports to per‑agency receipts complex to reconstruct from summary data alone [1] [5].
3. NCMEC’s international footprint — many recipients, no public per‑agency ledger
NCMEC publicly states it refers a large share of reports outside the U.S. (more than 84% of reports are referred outside the U.S.) and that it has law‑enforcement partnerships in some 167 countries and territories, including working relationships with Interpol and Europol for dissemination where direct national links don’t exist [1]. Those statements establish that many jurisdictions, potentially including the NCA, receive CyberTipline referrals, but they stop short of publishing how many referrals each partner agency receives in a given year [1].
4. What the available data can and cannot answer about NCA receipts
Because none of the supplied sources publishes or cites a per‑agency referral table or an NCA‑specific annual count, it is not possible — on the basis of the provided reporting — to state how many CyberTipline referrals the NCA received from NCMEC each year over the last five years; making such a claim would require either an NCMEC data extract that breaks out recipients by agency/country or an authoritative disclosure from the NCA itself, neither of which appears in the sources provided [1] [2] [3].
5. Pathways to the missing numbers and why agencies might not publish them
To obtain the NCA‑specific annual figures one would likely need a formal information request: ask NCMEC for an exports‑by‑recipient table or submit a public‑records/FOI request to the NCA for inbound referral statistics; organizations sometimes withhold such granular operational data for privacy, ongoing investigation or interagency confidentiality reasons, which would explain the absence from public CyberTipline summaries [1] [2]. In the absence of such disclosures, the best available public indicators remain the CyberTipline’s overall yearly report totals and NCMEC’s descriptions of referral practice and international reach [3] [1].