Report reveals Australians lost $2.7 billion to scams in 2023

ABC NEWS (Australia)

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.

Transcript

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.

03:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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