Interview on 3AW Mornings with Tom Elliott on Social Media scams

Tom Elliott (Host): I wanted to talk about scams in a moment. We know there’s many different scams from getting emails – I saw one in my spam today, saying I have a photo of you doing something you shouldn’t have been doing, if you don’t give me $2000 I’ll release the pictures online. I just deleted it. But the latest one is interesting. They use a number of celebrities. It used to be money, financial celebrities, Alan Kohler, David Koch, people like that. Now it’s people like Sophie Monk, the former singer from Bardot, Rob Irwin, who’s late Steve Irwin’s son, and they doctor video footage of them on TV and imply that they’ve got this secret app on their phones that you just download the app and it just starts trading markets on your behalf and making you money. And the problem is, of course, people A, think it’s real, that it’s Sophie monk or Rob Irwin and they really do have the app. B, that such an app is a possible thing, and I’m here to tell you it is not. There is no app that just makes you money guaranteed. If we had one, none of us would have to work. And they imply that, you know, only celebrities have access to the app, but you can have access to the app. And of course, the app is a scam. People try and download it. It generally relieves them of money, and it takes them a while to realise that they’re paying money, not making money. So, it’s a scam that uses celebrities, it appears online, and it does trade on people’s gullibility to think that there is a way to make money which doesn’t involve any effort. CEO of the Australian Banking Association, Anna Bligh, good morning.

Anna Bligh (Guest): Good morning. Tom, how are you?

Tom Elliott: Well, I’m good. So to me, this scam is a bit different from some of the others, because it does play a bit on people’s greed, doesn’t it?

Anna Bligh: Well, it does certainly, offer something that, if you really thought about it, is too good to be true. And I think you use the word gullibility, you know, we all like to believe sometimes that something is that easy. But frankly, it’s not. And they’re using these celebrities to give credibility to something that is just not plausible.

Tom Elliott: One of the things I find that the footage looks quite good like they’ve taken actual footage of, in this case, Sophie Monk and Robert Irwin and sort of spliced it in with some fake stuff. Are you worried about AI, and its ability to generate fake images and fake footage of real people and make something that isn’t real seem real.

Anna Bligh: I think we should all be worried about it. I think that AI will be a double edged sword. In the hands of criminals, yes, increasingly, they’re going to be able to use it to put out all sorts of fake information. And we’re all going to have to get better at working out what’s true and what’s not, and being a little bit more suspicious. But, also in the hands of banks and law enforcement and telcos and social media platforms, AI should be a very powerful weapon in recognising when something is going wrong and picking it up before it gets to customers in the first place. So, you know, I think it will have very powerful uses in stopping scams and recognising them and not letting it get to customers. But it is going to be something that criminals will be able to use, just like they use other technologies now to try and trick us.

Tom Elliott: Yeah, like, I mean sending you a text message which appears to come from your bank, and it’s very, very clever, and you might have even had texts from your bank before, but it’s not real. What about the role of the social media platforms? Now, I know the government’s got its I don’t know if they’re still pushing ahead with the misinformation and disinformation bill, but I have my concerns about that in you know, in terms of what we define, who defines what is mis and disinformation. But part of that bill, I believe, was to try and force the social media companies like Facebook and so forth to take down obvious scams. Is there any move to try and get them to do that?

Anna Bligh: Well, first thing I’d say that every part of the sort of chain that leads up to a scam, in my view, needs to take responsibility. The social media platforms – and there’s been a 30% increase in the complaints to the National Anti-Scam Centre from social media scams. So, the social media platforms need to take responsibility. So do the telephone companies that allow things to come through your thread, as you just said, and so do banks. They’ve got to do everything they can to stop people misusing accounts etc. The Government, I’m pleased to say, does have a bill before the Parliament, and when the Parliament resumes in a couple of weeks time, I very much hope that it will be a Bill that’s passed. It will be a new way of holding all of those three sectors accountable, including banks. It will put obligations on telcos, social media platforms and banks to take very proactive steps to prevent scams in the first place and impose penalties on them if they don’t do so. This will be a sort of world first in how to tackle scams. And I think that, the sooner we get it going, the better. Because I think the other thing to understand, not only is it completely unacceptable that these sorts of ads are being put up in the first place, these companies make money out of these ads, criminals pay to have these fake ads on platforms like X, that’s the platform that’s got the Sophie Monk investment scam up. So they’re not only putting all of us at risk by allowing these ads in the first place, they’re profiting from it, from criminal activity that is harming Australians. And it just beggars belief, in my view, that it’s allowed to happen.

Tom Elliott: All right, thank you. Anna. Anna Bligh there, CEO of the Australian Banking Association. I must say, last year I changed banks, and I’ve noticed my new bank, they make it quite difficult to pay people money. You have to go through a series of questions. And one of the features I really like, if you’ve been given someone’s BSB an account number, you have to say what the name of the account is, and if the name that you give doesn’t match the name that appears to be on file, the bank says, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?’ So, they are making it harder to pay money to potential scammers.

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