Data released by the Australian competition and consumer commission has shown scammers stole billions of dollars from Australians last year and older people are often the targets.
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00:00 Unfortunately, it found that these enormous and devastating losses are continuing.
00:07 Billions of dollars.
00:08 Last year, $2.7 billion lost in total, and authorities fear the real losses are actually
00:15 much higher.
00:16 And what they're finding is that people over 65 are really being targeted here.
00:21 Their losses are going up, so they're really worried about that.
00:25 The biggest losses, about half, come from investment scams, so that's usually when people
00:30 are looking to boost their retirement savings and they're looking for a savings account
00:35 with a slightly higher interest rate or something of that nature.
00:39 Crypto scams is another one that falls into that category.
00:43 And then we have remote access scams where people get access, the scammers get access
00:48 to a laptop or another device, and that enables them to take control of a bank account or
00:53 something else.
00:54 And then romance scams are really big, hundreds of millions of dollars lost to romance scams.
01:00 And despite the losses being so big, they have fallen slightly from the previous year,
01:05 which was a record high.
01:07 The government, the Minister Stephen Jones was out today and said that he was optimistic
01:14 that some of the interventions they've put in place is starting to move things in the
01:18 right direction, even though losses are so huge.
01:21 Let's hear from him.
01:23 The data in this report gives us hope that with the right action, with the right program,
01:29 with the right policies, we can take the scammers off and we can be saving Australians millions
01:34 and millions of dollars.
01:36 So $2.7 billion, still too much, but the trend is that the losses are coming down and that's
01:42 good news indeed.
01:45 One of the most common ways people are being contacted by scammers, Michael.
01:49 Well, if people are anything like me, this won't be a surprise.
01:53 The bombardment of scam text messages continues.
01:57 Most days when I wake up, I've got a couple on my phone and they are increasing dramatically.
02:02 So that's the most common scam contact point and that's increased by more than 30% in the
02:09 last year.
02:10 So what's happening there is obviously nowhere near good enough.
02:14 Scam calls are what results in the largest amount of losses and social media is really
02:21 flourishing.
02:22 Scams on socials is widespread and there's a lot of criticism that not enough is being
02:28 done there either.
02:29 All right.
02:30 So what are scam victims and consumer advocates calling on government and industry to do next?
02:35 Largely they're saying the burden for prevention and disruption, detection of scams is falling
02:42 unfairly on consumers and they say that the level of sophistication now with these scams
02:48 that may use artificial intelligence and all these other methods that are really quite
02:54 clever and crafty and quite difficult for an ordinary person to detect, mean that the
02:59 burden needs to be shifted from the consumer to industry to do far more and that reimbursement
03:06 should follow suit if they fail to do so.
03:09 That is a very difficult argument that's underway and what is going to happen in this
03:14 space we're going to find out in the coming months and it will be very interesting to
03:19 see where it lands.
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