MOORE:
Well, if you’ve ever asked a tax question online and got a response from what you thought was the tax office, apparently numerous fake accounts are pretending to be the ATO, offering to help and then asking for personal information. In fact, I’ve got a text here saying, “I’ve just had a message from the ATO telling me to access $13,000 in tax returns from previous years. What a scam,’ says that texter. Stephen Jones is the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services. Minister, good morning.
JONES:
Good morning, Ali. Good to be with you.
MOORE:
How does this scam work?
JONES:
It works through the scammers setting up a fake profile on Facebook or an Instagram or on Twitter or even LinkedIn. Somebody, an unsuspecting person, thinks they’re contacting a legitimate ATO site. They send them a question and the scammer tries to generally divert them off to a direct message service or an SMS service. And the objective from the scammer’s point of view is to get your login details and get your personal information. They then use that through ID theft to access money that you might have or they onsell your information on the dark web.
MOORE:
And, for example, the text that I just read out before, is that the sort of thing they might entice you, with the idea that you’ve got money owing – as in owing to you – which might encourage you to get more involved?
JONES:
Yeah, absolutely. You click one of those links, you’re into their world, your first step in putting your foot in the trap. And you start uploading information and they use that information to either directly steal your money or to sell it on to somebody else who might sit patiently for months, sometimes years, and use that information down the track to steal your money.
MOORE:
How realistic are they? Like, are there easy things that you’d be able to pick early on that you’re not actually with the ATO?
JONES:
Well, I’m looking at one at the moment which pretends to the be ATO Commissioner, the Tax Office Commissioner, Chris Jordan. Now, I know most people don’t like, you know, the tax office, but he’s got zero likes and zero followers, and that’s a pretty good indication that that’s not real.
MOORE:
Well, I mean, is it? As I say, no one likes the tax office. Maybe not.
JONES:
You know, I expect that maybe his son or his wife might actually like the page.
MOORE:
Okay, so that’s a good guide.
JONES:
I’m jesting, and this is a serious subject matter. A pretty good sign if they’ve joined recently. The tax office has had a social media presence for almost as long as Facebook has existed, for example. If somebody’s pretending to be the tax office and they only joined in October last year, that’s a pretty good indication that it’s a fake. And individual tax office employees won’t use a Facebook profile to contact somebody. In fact, no government agency contacts and asks for information over social media. They’ll use a secure portal to do all of that and they’ll never ask you to directly upload your information by clicking a link.
MOORE:
Are there though, real ways that the ATO uses social media to answer a question?
JONES:
They might answer a question, and generally it will be providing general advice, not specific advice, around, for example, when lodgement dates might close or the requirement to get a director ID or where you might go for more information on these sorts of things. But what they won’t do is provide a link which requires you to upload personal information. They won’t do that by social media and they won’t do it by an SMS. They’ll use myGov as the portal through which those sorts of messages are sent.
MOORE:
Do you have any sense of how many people have actually fallen victim to this sort of scam?
JONES:
Well, there’s been hundreds of profiles that have been taken off just in response to the one that we’re talking about this morning. So hundreds of social media profiles pulled down. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole – you pull some down and new ones go up. So we’ve got to continually be on our game about it. Yes, people have lost money, and I’m not talking about one or two or three people – hundreds of people have lost money through these scams. And, in fact, if you look across the economy, Ali, over the last 12 months in excess of $4 billion have been lost to scams. Not just this one but by a range of different scams – investment scams lead the leader board, but, you know, lots of other scams. Important that people are aware what to look out for, and we’ve been talking this morning about a few things to look out for. And the government’s got a program of work addressing this issue as well.
MOORE:
Well, I mean, you’ve just described it as whack-a-mole. So how easy is it to get the sites removed when they’re identified? And, how do you possibly keep up? When you say the government’s got a program of work, what is that?
JONES:
There’s a couple of things that we’ve established or we’ve got work going on since we came into government in May last year. The first is setting up a National Anti-Scam Centre. And that’s about bringing together the resources and the knowledge and expertise of the private sector, state government and federal government agencies in one place and working in real time. So as scams like the one we’re discussing today emerge, you get the regulators and the agencies on it immediately. They can send information out, they can be contacting banks, they can be putting all the financial institutions and the regulators and the tax office and others on notice these things are happening, be aware of it. We can move quickly with the telecommunications companies and social media platforms about getting pull-down orders in place. So working in real time as these things emerge. In addition to that, putting in place new codes of practice which put obligations on the social media platforms and the telecommunications companies themselves to pull down this stuff when they become aware of it and to move quickly and to put in place anti‑scamming policies in their own networks.
MOORE:
And we looked to that last week – moves to better manage misinformation and disinformation. But I guess, Stephen Jones, one of the biggest problems that you and every other government has is simply the number of scammers and how – you know, how fast they are at adapting.
JONES:
Yeah, it’s true, there is, you know, an industry out there. A lot of it operating offshore, and they move quickly and they look at a vulnerability and they exploit it. Our objective through all the policies we’re putting in place right across the economy is to make Australia a destination of last resort, the least-favoured nation, if you like, for these international scam syndicates to operate. It’s like the burglar who walks down a street and hears a dog barking in one and sees a security camera in another and then sees another with the front door open – they’re not going to go to the one with the barking dog or the security camera; they’re going to go to the one that looks the most vulnerable. So from a scam and a cyber crime perspective we want to make Australia look like the hardest nut to crack so these international crime syndicates look elsewhere.
MOORE:
Well, talking about hard nuts to crack, just a couple of other quick questions: first is inflation. We’re going to get the latest inflation numbers on Wednesday. Are you as confident as the Treasurer appears to be that inflation will have peaked in those numbers that we see Wednesday?
JONES:
Early signs look good. There’s been a lot of pain, obviously, for households and businesses in the aggressive actions of the Reserve Bank, like every other reserve bank in the world, in jacking up interest rates fast and hard. We’d hate to see that pain happening without gain, and it appears that, you know, the early signals are good. To early to crack a champagne cork, but we think the early signals are good. And that together with what we’re seeing in China and some of our other major markets makes us a little more optimistic, I’ve got to say, Ali, in January this year than perhaps we were in December last year about the prospects for the economy over the course of the year.
MOORE:
And just another story that you’re quoted on this morning is cryptocurrency and regulating it, which the government is looking at. If you did classify all cryptocurrencies as financial products, would that necessarily mean a safer environment for investors, because it’s going to be very difficult to regulate, isn’t it?
JONES:
Yeah, look, we won’t. Not all tokens, if I can use that – we sort of used to describe all of this stuff as cryptocurrency, and still a lot of people do. But if you sort of open the bonnet and look under the hood, you start to see that there’s lots of these tokens using block chain technology. Some of them do things which mimic financial products and regular currency and money. Some of them do other things. The things that do other things that have got nothing to do with financial services and financial markets, let the innovation go ahead. We’ve got no interest in that from a financial services point of view. But that stuff which directly interacts with financial markets or is attempting to mimic or translate a financial product, we are interested in that and we want to ensure that it’s able to continue to innovate but we do it in a way that is safe for consumers, so a safer ecosystem is the objective there. And, yes, we can do it, and we won’t be the only country in the world that’s moving in this direction. Now our token mapping exercise which we’re going through at the moment, we’re the first country in the world to do that and that will give us a good handle on what it is we’re attempting to regulate.
MOORE:
And will you have to regulate in concert with other countries? Because it’s often a cross-border issue?
JONES:
We’ll be regulating in parallel. I mean, yes, the point you raise is a good one – is it a cross-border issue. And what we’re attempting to do is ensure that we work consistent with the measures that are being put in place in the UK and North America, for example. But this is going to evolve over time I guess is the best way to put it, Ali. If we wait until somebody else builds a Rolls Royce before we decide to, you know, have something here in Australia, we’ll be leaving Australian consumers at risk. So we’ve got to move, but we’d be moving in a way that we think is in concert with other countries.
MOORE:
Stephen Jones, thank you very much for talking to us.
JONES:
Great to be with you.