Interview on ABC Perth about new scams campaign

Jo Trilling (Host): When was the last time your phone pinged with a message from your bank, a fake one, of course, because they are rarely ever real, but they are relentless. So, should the banks be doing more to stop it? Anna Bligh is the CEO of the Australian Banking Association. Welcome to Drive Anna. 

Anna Bligh (Guest): Good afternoon. Great to be with you.  

Jo Trilling: You’ve launched a new campaign to advertise how banks are tackling scams. How’s this going to better protect customers?  

Anna Bligh: Australian banks have come together, both our biggest banks right down to our smallest building societies. So regardless of who you bank with, they’ve put in place, or in the process of putting in place, a range of initiatives to fight back against some very sophisticated international criminal gangs that are preying on Australians and their savings, some very practical things, including building new capability to share intelligence. What does that mean? If one bank sees that a bank account is being used to put scam money into, they can tell every other bank in real time. They can shut it down. They can advise what they’re seeing in their bank so that others can, you know, get in front of that particular scam. But most importantly, one of the most important things they’re doing, and some customers will already be feeling this, others will start to feel it more over the coming months, and that’s putting more friction and delays and warnings into your payments when you transfer money from your account to pay a bill or send money to a friend. If it’s an account you haven’t paid before, especially if it’s usually a high amount of money on a risk basis, banks will either delay those funds being transferred for a while, or they’ll send you a warning saying, this is an unusual payment are you sure you want to do this? Or they’ll ask questions, do you know who you’re sending this to? What is this payment for? So, it might be for some customers a little more inconvenient but it’s been done to keep as many Australians safer as possible. 

Jo Trilling: Yeah, and these scams are just increasingly sophisticated. In fact, we spoke to somebody, a listener, who described themselves as being, you know, highly digitally literate. She still fell for a scam, but when they called her back, she had wits about her, and she recorded the conversation. His tone certainly changed at the end there. Is education important still Anna?  

Anna Bligh: I think a number of things are important. There’s no one single silver bullet that’s going to protect us all from these very sophisticated criminal gangs. But yes, the more we can educate ourselves as customers, that helps. So, for example, if somebody calls you and says they’re from the fraud team at your bank and your account is being compromised, and you need to start transferring your money out of that account to another account, your bank will never, ever call you unprompted and ask you to transfer money like that. So, if somebody calls and they panic you, you know, of course, you get panicked when you hear that, but if your bank is worried about your account being compromised, they will freeze the funds, and then they’ll talk to you. They won’t ask you to on the phone to do that. So, if anyone rings and says I’m from the fraud team, please transfer your money as quickly as possible. You can hang up because that’s a scammer. I didn’t hear all of the call that you just replayed, but they’re exactly the kinds of questions that you know it’s smart to ask, if you’ve got any doubts, but banks have to play their part as well. So do telcos, so do social media platforms. I think the first priority should be to stop scams getting to people in the first place, and most of them come through our phones, through SMS messages, through emails and on social media platforms. If we can stop those coming into the country as much as possible, that’ll be a good start. Banks need to do everything they can to put, as I said, friction and delays into the system so that if you get off the phone and you think, oh, I’m not sure that was right, you can ring your bank and the money will still be in your account because they’ve delayed its transfer. But one of the other things that banks are doing, they’ve come together and jointly, they’re funding a new system wide piece of technology that will allow them to accurately confirm that you are paying the right person and match the name to the account number. And I think most people are surprised to know this doesn’t happen now, but we’re in the middle of building that technology, and when it’s finished, Australia will be the third or the fourth country in the world to have that in place. So, we have to stay in front of these scammers. And banks need to do everything they can, so do telcos, so do social media platforms and as customers, we need, I mean, it’s a horrible thing to say, I think, but we need to be a bit suspicious sometimes when people say they’re from the tax office, or they say they’re from your bank, or they, you know, they say they’re from somewhere, and you’ve suddenly got to start moving your money around. It pays to ask questions and just be a little bit suspicious.  

Jo Trilling: I’m speaking to Anna Bligh. She’s the CEO of the Australian Banking Association. They’ve launched a new campaign to advertise how banks are tackling scams. I mean, Anna, we’ve got the highest losses here in Australia when it comes to bank scams. I think last year, the figures were 600,000 people losing more than two and a half billion dollars. Surely the banks can be doing even more than this. I mean, if you look at the UK, new legislation will come into play in October, which means banks have to refund scam victims, and that responsibility is shared between the bank who lost the money and the bank who received the money. Why on earth are Australian banks not doing the same here? 

Anna Bligh: Well, firstly, can I say that if, in Australia, if your bank does the wrong thing and allows someone to hack into your account without your knowledge, you will be reimbursed, and that’s been the situation for a long time, and that’s in that respect, it’s the same as the UK.  

Jo Trilling: Well, the UK is going even further, though, because it doesn’t have to be your fault? 

Anna Bligh: That’s right, when it is not your fault and you haven’t, you haven’t done anything, Australian banks will reimburse you, and that’s been the case for a long time. What we’re looking at in Australia is a different approach to the UK, and frankly, it’s working. One is to prevent the scams getting here as much as possible. The second phase will be the government is going to introduce mandatory requirements for each part of the scam chain to meet certain obligations. And if they fail to do that, then they will have to reimburse. So, if the telco does the wrong thing, they will have to make a payment.  

Jo Trilling: You say that it’s working. We had the highest losses when it comes to bank scams, two and a half billion dollars.  

Anna Bligh: I’m not sure where you’ve got that data from. That’s certainly not the data that I’ve seen globally, but any money is too much. What we do know is that we’ve seen a 13 per cent reduction in losses and scams in Australia compared to a 4 per cent reduction in the UK. So, I’d rather be on a faster downhill, but there’s more that can be done, and the government’s new mandatory requirements will certainly make a difference, and they’ll apportion blame and liability much more fairly and proportionately than I think is happening in the UK. If your telco lets a scam come to your phone when they already knew that number should have been, you know, cut off. then they should make some payment. If your bank sends money, allows money to go to an account that they should have they reasonably knew had been used for scamming, then they should pay something. If your social media platform continues to advertise a dodgy investment scam that impersonates a celebrity, for example, and refuses to take that down, well, in my view, they’re a big multinational company, and they should bear some of it as well. 

Jo Tilling: Anna, good to talk to you. Thanks for your time this afternoon.  

Anna Bligh: Thanks a lot. Thank you.  

Jo Tilling: Well, that was Anna Bligh. She is the CEO of the Australian Banking Association. 

Ends 

Anna BlighScamstranscript