The ACCC has welcomed the contribution of the financial services sector in helping to deliver a significant drop in dollar losses to scams, with the consumer protection watchdog’s Scamwatch service recording a 43 per cent decline in losses to scams between the October to December 2023 quarter and the previous corresponding quarter.
Australians reported $82.1 million in losses to the Scamwatch service in the final quarter of 2023, almost half the number reported in the corresponding October to December 2022 period.
Overall reports of scams also declined by eight per cent over this same period, and dropped 14 per cent over the previous July to September 2023 quarter, with Scamwatch registering 67,116 scam reports in total in the quarter.
Dollar-value losses from scams were reported to be down across all scam types, with some of the biggest declines seen in cryptocurrency scams (down by 74 per cent over the previous corresponding quarter to $12.4 million), phishing scams (down 62 per cent to 4.1 million), false billing scams (down 53 per cent to $4.2 million) and investment scam losses (down 38 per cent to $52.4 million).
Speaking at Australian Payments Plus’s (AP+) inaugural summit today, Westpac’s head of fraud and financial crime insights, Ben Young, noted the banking sector’s active engagement with cryptocurrency providers has driven this “remarkable” decline in reported scam activity tied to crypto investments.
“For us, the engagement with the cryptocurrency industry has been really significant and temporally correlated,” Young said.
This was a standout achievement, he added, considering unique convictions that often determine investors’ decisions to invest in crypto instruments and exchanges.
“The management of scams is seen as a fairly maternalistic [sic] process over customers’ use of funds, and within the crypto industry there is a bit more a philosophy around being independent.”
“[Therefore] the engagement we’ve had with the crypto industry has been pretty positive over the last few months. They’ve been coming on a journey with us… to help customers have a better understanding of how they’re spending their money.”
Jayde Richmond, who heads the ACCC’s National Anti-Scam Centre, also recognised the banks’ successful collaboration with the crypto sector in reducing these, typically high-value, scams.
She added that the stabilisation and even decline in reported scams correlates strongly with an increase in cooperation and collaboration between government and the private sector, as well as other dedicated financial sector-led initiatives, including the emerging Scam Accord.
This, she noted, was catalysed by the establishment mid-last year of the ACCC’s Anti-Scam Centre, which has ushered in the all-round decline in reported scam activity.
“What’s been really working well is that the Centre was set up as a way of enhancing public-private partnership, a way of working together with industry, with government, law enforcement and with consumer organisations, [to bring] together that expertise.
“What we’ve shown with the work, particularly in the investment scam fusion cell, is that we’ve really been able to share information, and to try some new things in terms of… sharing data and implementing initiatives that have real impact.”
The dedicated fusion cells, which are hosted by the National Anti-Scam Centre, are time-limited anti-scam task forces which assemble experts from government, the ACCC, ASIC and the private sector (including banks, telcos and digital platforms) to devise solutions to urgent concerns.
For Toby Evans, AusPayNet’s head of economic crime, the National Anti-Scam Centre has been a key facilitator of cross-sector collaboration, bringing industry experts “into the one room” to tackle the scam scourge.
“It’s shown [the impact of] those who are willing to participate, those that are collaborative, and those who are taking real action, but it also gives a friendly nudge to those in the ecosystem and across the scams lifecycle who have yet to meet those minimum obligations.”
The collective messaging efforts organised by this group are also having a tangible impact on consumers, who appear increasingly to be savvy to scammers’ tactics.
“We’re seeing that erosion of trust in the digital economy with online advertising, the erosion of trust with the telecommunications service with people not responding to clickable links or responding to phone calls anymore, and we’re seeing some meaningful action in that industry, especially with the Sender ID registry,” Evans said.
Importantly, he added, and particularly combined with the Government’s Cyber Security Strategy, law enforcement is taking a more active role in cracking down on scams.
“We are dealing with a global organised crime problem and that’s something we often forget – it’s a global challenge. We’re turning the tap down a little bit. There’s plenty more that can be done, but bringing everyone together is a key part of what the ACCC is doing.”
Challenges in scaling
Despite the Anti-Scam Centre’s clear successes, there are – six months in – still teething problems.
Richmond noted, in particular, the challenges of scaling scam-busting operations and technologies that have been successfully trialled by the Centre.
“We just don’t yet have the capability to real scale those up across the ecosystem,” she said.
“We don’t have all parts of the ecosystem contributing equally and we’re working on how we can coordinate better data-sharing across the ecosystem, so there’s still work to be done.”
However, the clear decline in scam reports does augur well for the Anti-Scam Centre’s collaborative efforts thus far.
“It’s a good sign for everyone that doing this work matters and that it can work.
“We are hoping that this trend [of declining scam reports] continues, but we are cautious; we know sometimes there can be big scams that come along and take us all by surprise so we need to be vigilant.
“But we’re very happy to see we are having an impact and we’re looking to see how we can scale this up to have even more impact.”
