ANDRÉ LESLIE:
Stephen Jones is the federal Assistant Treasurer and the minister responsible for the National Anti‑Scam Centre. Hello, minister, welcome to Drive.
STEPHEN JONES:
Good afternoon. Good to be with you.
LESLIE:
Let’s look first at the most common types of scams in Australia, because they’re always changing, aren’t they?
JONES:
They really are. And if you look at scams by losses, investment scams make up over half the losses that Australians are experiencing. So, in the last year, there was about $2.75 billion worth of losses, about half of that was investment scams. So – fake bonds, fake term deposits, cryptocurrency scams and the like. So, they’re the biggest category by loss. But the ones that you’ve been mentioning – the mass distribution scams – your mum got the ‘hey, mum’ scam, which there’s a lot of variations on it. ‘Hey, mum, can you put some money in my account?’, ‘Hey, Mum, lost my phone. Here’s my new number.’ That’s still a common one, getting around. And employment scams, romance scams, fake charities, as you’ve mentioned, as quick as we knock them on the head, new ones come up. So, being aware and being cautious about some of the things that you do online is absolutely critical. I never do an interview like this without giving my 3 rules of thumb. One is, if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. The second one is don’t press those bloody blue links in your SMS messages or in your emails, because that’s what scammers use to lure you off into a fake website. Don’t give your information out online or to an unsolicited call. And don’t let anyone remote access into your computer. These are the tricks that scammers use and the things to avoid.
LESLIE:
I mentioned that story with my mum because it is a common sort of classic that I don’t want to downplay it, but we hear about them a lot. Are older people more at risk here, do we think?
JONES:
Older people are obviously a target, and when I do my community forums, I say, well, why do you think older people are losing more money? And invariably people say, oh, because maybe we’re more trusting or we’re not as familiar with technology. Look, there might be a little bit of that, but the real reason that older people are being targeted by the scammers is because they realise that older people are more likely to have more money, they’ve got their superannuation or they’ve got their savings put away and they’re more likely to have a little bit more money and therefore they’re more likely to be a target of the scammers who are smart. They’re more likely to have a psychology degree than a prison record, and they know who their targets are, and that’s why they’re focusing on certain demographics, who are more likely to have money that they can steal off them.
LESLIE:
The National Anti‑Scam Centre is something that perhaps not everyone knows about. What is it, and what else is the government doing to combat scammers at the moment?
JONES:
So, we set the National Anti‑Scam Centre up to be a nerve centre and an information collecting vehicle and an education resource. That was a part of our first wave of reforms and we put it in place because when we came into government, we saw the numbers of scams doubling every year. We’ve been able to arrest that number of doubling every year, but still far too high. The Anti‑Scam Centre, set up through the ACCC, builds on the old Scamwatch that your listeners would be familiar with, and it has the role of collecting scam information from the public, from banks, from telecommunications companies and from social media platforms, and sharing that information amongst the networks. So, as soon as something’s reported, we’re able to share it amongst the networks so that those businesses know what to look out for in their networks. So, it’s a critical part of our prevention mechanism. But we’ve also got these things we call fusion cells, which are essentially task forces that are going after specific sorts of scams and putting in place prevention operations to block the scammers from their victims. We’ve had some good success in that area, intercepting calls, giving messages to people who are about to engage through a phone call with a scam message, a scam – scammer, and letting them know that they’ve been in contact with a scammer, when we’re able to detect those things, is something that’s working quite well and hundreds of millions of dollars have been saved through that mechanism. So, we know that stuff’s working and obviously the education response that we ramp up during Anti‑Scam Week. But also it’s a 52‑week‑a‑year job. So, there are 3 clear functions of the National Anti‑Scam Centre and other work with inside government we’ve done, put in place in Phase One, we’ve got the Australian Securities and Investment Commission empowered to pull down fake websites. They’ve pulled down about 5,000 fake websites over the last year, which is another favoured mechanism of the scammers to lure people. They think they’re dealing with a bank, or they think they’re dealing with an investment business, and it’s a scammer sitting behind that operation. So, a lot of work’s being done, but that’s the first phase. Happy to talk to you about and your listeners about what we’re doing in the next phase.
LESLIE:
Well, I think we’re going to have to wrap it up, unfortunately, minister, let’s just leave it at this. If someone’s listening today and has recently been a victim of a scam, has got some details for the National Anti‑Scam Centre. Where do they contact, and how can they do it quickly?
JONES:
Scamwatch.gov.au. So, go online, you’ll see the Scamwatch website that feeds through to the National Anti‑Scam Centre. We encourage reporting because the person who tried to scam you is probably out there trying to scam thousands of other people as well. So, it’s important that we do report so that we can use that intelligence to go after these criminals who are trying to steal our money.
LESLIE:
All right, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones, we’ll leave it there. Thanks for your time today.
JONES:
Good to be with you.