Anna Bligh interview on The Project about scams

Georgie Tunny: Anna Bligh is CEO of the Australian Banking Association. And we’ve heard so many examples of scammers infiltrating customers existing phone message threads from banks. If people can’t trust the bank’s own correspondence, what hope do they have?  

Anna Bligh: The stories that you’ve run this week have been absolutely heartbreaking. And I hear these stories from bank customers and bank staff very frequently. Unfortunately, we’ve seen an explosion of scams around the world, when you think about the fact that they’ve been able to get into a banks telephone thread. I think there’s a question here, not just for banks, it’s about joining the system up, you know, how did that happen through your telco provider, we need to look at the very beginning of a scam. It never starts in your bank, it starts on your phone, on your laptop, in an SMS on a search engine. We need to join the whole system. So that we break the scamming chain.  

Kate Langbroek: The scams might not start with a bank, but they certainly end with the bank when people lose money. Does it mean that people should now treat every message from a bank with suspicion?  

Anna Bligh: Well, I’d like to think is that we’re not too far away from finding such a technology solutions to the problem of banks and other organizations being impersonated? But it is important that we all think about and be a little suspicious when we start to get these sorts of messages. Your bank will never ever ask you to transfer funds to an account, another account over the phone. And so, if someone rings, and says I’m from your bank’s fraud department, and I need you to transfer money to another account, they’re a scammer hang up. 

Waleed Aly: So that’s important advice, and it deals with that particular scam. But of course scams evolve, it’ll be something else that we don’t know about a can’t spot and all that sort of thing later, which takes us really to the question of reimbursement. And here I honestly don’t understand Australia position, in the US 75 per cent of scam victims at the big banks are reimbursed, in the UK 70 per cent are reimbursed. And that’s before this new legislation, which will make it compulsory in most cases and taking much closer to 100 per cent. In Australia, it’s nowhere near that, the last report we had from up to 2022 was 4 per cent. Why don’t Australian customers deserve the same?  

Anna Bligh: I think you’ll find that you’re not comparing apples and apples. In the UK, they refer to both hacking and scams as the same thing. Here in Australia, if your bank is hacked in, and somehow people get into your account without you pressing anything, your bank will reimburse you. And that’s counted in the UK numbers. So, in fact, not every scam victim in the UK gets reimbursed if they have acted negligently on their account. So, for example, if they give away their PIN number, then the chances of them being reimbursed is much much lower. We as customers, also have to be as careful as we can. Bad people have been trying to trick people out of money since time began. The difference today is that it’s now happening globally on an industrialised scale to it. And that means all of us being more vigilant. 

Waleed Aly: So, do you accept though that saying that customers need to be more vigilant. Just doesn’t make any sense anymore. So, I feel like what we get from the bank says be careful with your passwords, pay attention to this pay attention to that. Do you at the very least just as a starting point for the conversation except we are way way past that, that there is nothing that you can ask individual customers to do that’s going to make the difference here?  

Anna Bligh: Oh, look, I always think there’s a role for customers to do the right thing and do what they can to keep themselves safe. But there’s equally a really big role for banks and others. Can I say this, though, that in Australia, in the last 12 months, we’ve started to see scams, and the amount of money lost to scams in decline for the first time in more than a decade. We’re one of the very few countries in the world where this is happening in. So, our system is starting to work. 

Waleed Aly: Whatever improvements we’re seeing this is still destroying people’s lives. Bottom line, why shouldn’t you be reimbursing these people? 

Anna Bligh: Well, I think there’s a real question here about if the scam came to the customer, through a telco, if it came through a social media platform, if the bank warned the customer that this was a scam, and they went ahead with the payment. I do think there’s a legitimate question here about whether or not banks are really the ones that should be stumping up the cash 

Waleed Aly: There are cases of gross negligence. Where the customer really, really stuffed up and they really should have known better. But that’s largely yesterday’s news. I’m talking about the cases we’re seeing now, where this would afford most people. We’re seeing it for people who work in the industry. Why shouldn’t you as the institution that’s facilitating the payments, why shouldn’t you be reimbursing them? 

Anna Bligh: If the customer directs the bank to make a payment? Banks are legally required to follow that direction. They can put delays in, they can try to talk to customers, that can try to prevent it. But what I think the other important thing here is, banks are not the final judge on this if a customer has lost money through a scam where they directed the bank to make the payment, they can take a complaint to a free financial complaints authority who oversees these complaints of this nature. And if that authority thinks the bank was liable or should be liable, then they will direct the bank to make a full payment. That’s not an unfair system.  

Waleed Aly: It’s one that requires a lot of resources. If everyone is to complain, I do take your point. I thank you also for fronting up. I know it’s not an easy thing for you to talk about. It’s such a big issue at the moment though we appreciate your thoughts.  

Anna Bligh: Thank you and thank you for shining a light on it. 

Ends 

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