MICHAEL MOFFETT:
I want to have a chat to Stephen Jones, who is the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services, about all the scams and what’s being done about it. The Minister is on the phone. G’day.
STEPHEN JONES:
Hey, good to be with you.
MOFFETT:
Look, it’s a busy time, of course, and everyone’s got so much going on, but one of the things that I think a lot of people are still getting caught up with is scams, isn’t it?
JONES:
Absolutely true. You know, a few years ago, we saw scams doubling every year. So, when we came into government, they were at about $3 billion of losses a year. Slightly good news. They’ve come down a bit. We’ve managed to arrest the growth, but $2.75 billion worth of losses last year is nothing to celebrate. We’ve got a lot more work to do to keep Australians and their money safe from these criminals who are preying upon them.
MOFFETT:
The thing is now, though, Stephen, I mean, there’s so many ways that people are getting caught. There’s so many. I mean, they’re so brazen, aren’t they?
JONES:
Look, they’ve become a lot more sophisticated. A few years back, it was the Nigerian prince promising love and bounty through a simple email that was loaded with spelling mistakes. Now they’ve become a lot more sophisticated since then. We’re now seeing large‑scale call centre type operations and data centre operations from overseas who are preying upon Australians and other countries with quite sophisticated scams. They’re becoming harder to detect and we suspect that with the advent of AI, it’ll be even more difficult to detect these, which is why the government’s taking it seriously. We’ve set up a National Anti‑Scam Centre which is coordinating our defensive actions against these criminals. But we’ve also been working on some new legislation which will put far greater obligations on banks, on telecommunications companies and on social media platforms to lift their game and ensure that their customers are kept safe from these criminals.
MOFFETT:
It still does impress me, though, when you see with a lot of the banks and stuff and how quickly they’re onto this kind of thing, whether it’s scams, fraud, that kind of thing, because I know myself, I had to book accommodation over in the UK for Christmas time and I went to use my credit card for it and it blocked the card within seconds because it wasn’t sure, because it was like 03:00 in the morning that I was doing it. And so they’ve looked at that and gone, well, this might be, there might be an issue there. To see that within seconds that they can put those blocks in place is impressive, but you just hope that things don’t slip through the cracks.
JONES:
Yeah, we’re pushing banks to do things like this, using technology to detect what we call out‑of‑character transactions. If you’ve got an account, you’ve traditionally just spent $500 a week out of that account, and it’s all conducted within a certain area, and all of a sudden you’re on the other side of the country spending up big in a casino somewhere. That’s an out of character transaction. And we’re getting– working with the banks to detect that sort of stuff and put what we call a bit more friction in the system to slow things down. The whole trend in payments and commerce over the last couple of decades has been instantaneous transfers. Make things go fast, make them seamless. We know this is to the benefit of the consumers. They can move money around and make money fast, but they can also lose money fast, which is why we’re now looking at putting a lot more friction in the process to slow some of these things down and ask some bigger questions. Of course, consumers have got to be on their guard themselves, but I’m asking banks and telcos and social media platforms to do much, much more. So, social media platforms, as an example, they’re a big publisher of these scams. So, fake investments, puppy scams, used cars that somebody doesn’t own and don’t exist being sold on marketplaces. These are some of the common examples that we see. Romance scams on dating sites. A big job of work needs to be done on the platforms. They provide a great service, but there’s a lot of pitfalls in there and they’re a honey pot for criminals. So, we’ve got to lift the bar there. Telecommunications companies, we’re filtering out about a million calls and SMS’ a day that we know are coming from criminals. But lots more are getting through, as your listeners will attest, you know, toll scams and all of this sort of stuff. So, much more needs to be done to filter out and block a lot of that malicious content as well. So, everyone’s got a role to play in lifting the game. And I’ll have new legislation which I’ll be introducing into Parliament later this year.
MOFFETT:
Fantastic. Always great to chat and hope to talk again soon, Minister, but thanks so much for your time this morning.
JONES:
Really good to be with you.
MOFFETT:
Stephen Jones, he’s the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services here on Triple M.