Interview with 6PR on the Government’s new Scam Awareness Campaign

Jamie Burnett (Host): But today, the Federal Government has launched a new scam awareness campaign encouraging you to stop, to check, to protect. Sounds good? Been welcomed by the Australian Banking Association, as you’d expect. Its CEO is Anna Bligh, good morning Anna. 

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

Jamie Burnett: Yeah, I’m doing okay. What’s the data tell us here? We’re losing more money to scammers than ever? 

Anna Bligh: Well, no, very encouragingly, Australia is one of the very few places in the world that in the last 12 months has seen the money that’s been lost to scams drop, and it’s dropped quite dramatically. It’s down about 40 per cent year on year. But if we want to keep seeing that go down, everybody’s got to play their part, including banks, telecommunication companies, the big social media platforms, but all of us as individuals can also play a part by just being a little bit more aware and hopefully less likely to be a victim of a scam.  

Jamie Burnett: Why do you think we’ve seen that downward trend?  

Anna Bligh: Well, there’s been a lot of factors that have contributed to it. Firstly, the government’s newly established National Anti-Scam Centre has now been operational for about 18 months, and that’s brought together law enforcement, banks, telcos, social media, platforms to really focus on some of the worst kinds of scams. The scams that most people lose the most money from are dodgy investment scams. So, you see something advertised on a social media platform offering you a return on your investment. It all looks pretty ridgy didge, and then you find out that, in fact, it’s completely non-existent, and your money’s disappeared. And you know, they’re the worst ones, because people often lose the most money. They invest, for example, some of their superannuation in it, and that can have lifelong consequences. We’ve really seen a big reduction in those now, banks have played their part. They’ve actually now been very careful about whether they transfer money to crypto platforms, because that was a way for money to leave the country very, very quickly. Regulators like ASIC now have new takedown powers, where if they see an ad for a company that they believe is not a real financial company, they can have that taken down. So, all of these things together have played their part. But I also think Australians have become more aware, everybody knows somebody who’s had some kind of scam perpetrated or tried to be perpetrated on them. And I think we’ve all got a lot more savvy, we’re very wary about unknown numbers on our phone. This media campaign, it’s got a very simple slogan. It’s stop, check and protect. And I think it would be great if it became part of our psyche, just like slip slop slap did, and we’ve got much better at sun protection. This is really about how can we get better at protecting ourselves from scams. Someone rings you and offers something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

Jamie Burnett: It’s tough, isn’t it, because there’s that human nature aspect to that. When we say something that we think could be a win, or, you know, a significant financial win for us, we all work so hard, it’s hard to stop that initial thought of, I’ve got to get on this. I don’t want to miss out. 

Anna Bligh: Absolutely right? Scammers really play on our emotions. Yes, they, you know, they play on that desire to get ahead and be ambitious, but they also play on, they also try to do things like cause you to panic. So they’ll ring, they’ll be impersonating your bank. They’ll be telling you that there’s something strange, that money is leaving your account, and you have to immediately do something like transfer funds out of that account. Your bank will never, ever, ever ring you unsolicited and ask you to transfer funds out of your account. If they think something really suspicious is happening on your account, they’ll freeze it, and they’ll ring and talk to you. They will never ask you to transfer funds, but that’s what these guys do. They ring you, they tell you there’s something, something very suspect happening on your account. So of course, you panic and you do whatever the person says. So, these ads are a great little reminder. They’re quite clever, they’ve got, they’ve got a small version of yourself sitting on your shoulder saying, hang on, stop, go and check. Is this really your bank? Is this person really who they say they are?  

Jamie Burnett: Yeah, obviously you represent the banks. But where do you see the balance of responsibility? How do you see that ledger at the moment between the banks taking financial responsibility for the scams generated off the back of their business and individuals who make decisions about these things that come their way?  

Anna Bligh: Well, it’s a really interesting question. The government is actually trying to solve this. At the moment, they have a piece of legislation before the Federal Parliament that will set up a scheme for the first time in Australia that will be doing just that, working out in each particular scam, whether you know how much the banks are liable, how much the telco might be because they let the phone call come through when they knew, or should have known, that it was a dodgy number, how much the social media platforms should have known and not let that dodgy financial ad go up in the first place. Now, I think what we’d all like, doesn’t matter whether you’re a bank or,  just a customer. What we’d all like is that you don’t get the scam in the first place, and everything that we can do to stop scams getting into the country, all of us should be doing that. Banks have a role to play, but scams don’t start with your bank, they start with a phone call, they start with an email. They start with you Googling and searching for something, and that’s where we’ve got to put a lot of attention. And yes, banks have got an obligation. They’ve got to keep your money safe. But there’s different, always different circumstances. If a person gives away their PIN number, ignores a warning from their bank, then I think there’s more individual responsibility than if the person didn’t do those things. So every scam is different, and I think particularly if this Bill gets passed by the Federal Parliament, I hope it does, then we will see that question answered much more clearly for Australians, for banks, for phone companies, and everybody will have a better idea of who’s responsible for which bits in this, but at the end of the day, there is some responsibility on us as customers to do things like keep our pin private, not to give our banking details away, and that’s an important part of your obligation as a customer. 

Jamie Burnett: I remember a story from a friend who was scammed through his bank, and he lost what was pretty much a house deposit for up to about six months and I just remember speaking to him in that period, and at the start, he was obviously fairly frantic about what was going on. And he went through this, these different cycles. And then toward the end of that six-month period, there was the realisation that he might not never get that that money back. And he toiled away for so long to be able to build up that deposit. And, there was an expectation of what that money was going to go to and what that would mean for his life progression. In the end, he was lucky enough to get the money back from that, but just that anxiety that he went through over that six month period, and just seeing him ride that roller coaster was pretty difficult to watch from the sidelines. You mentioned that every scam is different, do we know on average, how long it takes people to get a resolution when there is a significant scam, and it does come to something like bank savings. 

Anna Bligh: Again, it really depends on the circumstances of the scam. You know, how quickly the person realises they’ve been scammed and how quickly they advise their bank. Often the money is out of the country on a crypto platform, for example, it’s very very difficult to get that back. But banks do have a real time exchange of data, so I certainly would say if anyone, even if you just worried you might have been scammed. You know, bring your bank as quickly as you can, because they can then in almost real time, contact the bank that the money has been sent to and get a stop put on it until the circumstances can be investigated. So, I certainly know of scams that where people have recovered the money in less than a week, others, as you say could take months. So, it does take a very emotional toll on someone.  

Jamie Burnett: Are there free support services during those periods for people going through that? 

Anna Bligh: There are financial counselling services that help people go through this. And you know, financial counsellors around the country do a terrific job, and they do help people to navigate either through their bank or through – (there is in Australia, a complaints process, it’s called the Australian Financial complaints authority.) They will hear complaints if you think you haven’t been treated fairly by your bank, but there is an expectation, you know, at law, that customers will do the right thing about protecting your own information, so we’ve got to get the balance right, and that’s what this government campaign, which is why banks are saying this is a great initiative from the government, because it just helps all of us to just be a little bit more suspicious. And you know, you’d like to think we’d live in a world where you never have to be suspicious, but that’s not the real world, and unfortunately, these scams are getting more and more sophisticated. AI is going to be, on the one hand, I think, a very powerful tool for banks to catch scammers, but in the hands of scammers, AI is going to be a very powerful tool to trick us, so we’ve got to be even more alert. It in the coming years. Just 

Jamie Burnett: Finally, Anna, obviously, technology always outpaces regulation. These scams, a lot of them are based overseas, so it makes prosecution impossible, if not very difficult. Do you see a time where we won’t be talking about scams at this kind of scale in the future? 

Anna Bligh: I certainly hope so. You know, I think if we as a country all continue to work together, businesses, government and individuals that we can aspire to be one of the most scam free countries in the world. As I said, we’ve already almost halved the losses in less than two years. Now, it might take a longer time to get to the rest of it, but let’s keep working on it, because we’re a country that has a lot of opportunity, where people are prepared to do things to make things better, and that’s what we’re seeing. This campaign, the campaign by itself, is not going to bring scams down, it needs to be the campaign. It needs to be government legislation, which is currently before the Parliament, it needs to be businesses like banks and telcos and social media platforms all investing in better technology, safer products, and to keep doing all of that, I think we should be aspiring to drive those losses down and down further. 

Jamie Burnett: Anna, I appreciate your time on a Sunday morning. Thanks so much.  

Anna Bligh: Thanks a lot. Jamie.  

Jamie Burnett: Alright. Anna Bligh there, the CEO of the Australian Banking Association, talking off the back of this Federal Government initiative and awareness campaign asking you to stop, check, protect. Think we’re getting better at it. There’s good news off the top there from Anna, the dollar amount reducing by about 40 per cent when we’re looking at the money lost to scams.  

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