Australia’s biggest bank to deploy bots in fight against scammers

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The country's biggest bank is going to start using bots to fight back against scammers. Australians have lost at least $150 million this year so far to scammers. A lot of those losses are happening after people get called up by fraudsters, impersonating people from banks or government agencies. Commonwealth Bank is now rolling out thousands of fake bots to try and confuse them.

Transcript

00:00yeah that's correct so there's essentially two types of bot that we're running one is a voice

00:07bot which literally adopts australian personalities humor and nuances to pretend to be a real human

00:16being and we also have messaging bots that have interactions which are in the written form also

00:23mimicking the australian population to protect them and really super simply for any minute

00:29that our bots are engaged with the scammers those are minutes that are not that the scammers are not

00:37spent engaging with australians so essentially you're hoping to waste scammers time with bots

00:45apart from wasting their time how else do you think that this could disrupt scamming do you

00:51actually expect potentially these bots to figure out where the scammers are located and put the cops on

00:57them yeah so um the scale of the bots is quite significant there's 10 000 voice bots and 2 500

01:05messaging bots um that's the initial scale that we're rolling out to um we're encouraging other

01:12banks and telcos to join us uh on this journey so that we can build almost a national immunity to

01:18scammers if you like a defensive layer that makes it less profitable for scammers to operate uh within

01:24australia have you heard any of these calls yet between bots and scammers what sorts of things have

01:32the scammers been saying as they figured out that you've got bots on them um so generally speaking not

01:38yet there will come a point that they do um the calls are often very long um our longest call at the

01:44minute is 55 minutes where the scammers are completely unaware of it we also use the scam conversations

01:52both in messaging and voice to collect intelligence as well which we pull into the

01:57fraud systems at combang and we use that to protect other australians so simplistically one phone call

02:03might result in one piece of intelligence that then saves 10 other australians so a big multiplier

02:09effects to the efficiency and productivity of the bots and so you're using ai to power these bots there has

02:18been concerns from some quarters that robots are going to steal all of our jobs is anyone at combang

02:23actually losing their job as you send out the bots no not at all this is a complete innovation

02:31where ai has actually unlocked an ability to go further in deeper in making criminal syndicates

02:38profitability less so there's no job losses associated with that at combang and when it comes to scams as i

02:45mentioned 150 million lost so far this year and we're only in agreement at this point major banks

02:52have been criticized by consumer groups for putting the onus onto customers to not be scammed and then

02:58avoiding compensating customers when they are what do you make of this ongoing criticism against the banks

03:03so maybe what's helpful is um on the 20th of february the government instituted the new scams

03:12prevention framework act that gained royal assent um that places strong accountability in terms of

03:20fines if there is non-compliance in either the banks telecommunication industries or the digital

03:26platform social media and the like if we don't comply with the limits of those acts so a real

03:33strengthening and shared accountability and it's that shared accountability of reducing the bad content

03:38out there on sms's voice calls social media and the banks uplifting at the back end on the payment rails

03:45that's likely to be the successful story for australia

03:48you

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