TOM ELLIOTT:
All right, scam. The latest scam, or it’s a scam that’s been going around for a while, but it’s called the Hi Mum or Hi Dad scam. You get sent a text message. It purports to be from, say, a teenager or an adult child. You know, it’ll say something like ‘Hi, Mum, hi, Dad, my phone isn’t working. I’m using someone else’s. I’m stressed out because I owe $500 in the morning. Please could you send me this money? Send it to XYZ account’ and it is a scam. And what happens is the parents who are hoping to help their adult child send the $500 and it disappears into some criminal's bank account. Our next guest is the Assistant federal Treasurer, he’s also the Financial Services Minister, Stephen Jones. Good morning.
STEPHEN JONES:
Tom, good to be with you again, mate.
ELLIOTT:
Now, we spoke about this a month or so ago and you were working on frameworks and things like that. Have you got any specific policies to deal with scams now, like the one I just described?
JONES:
Good news for your listeners. We’ve got draft legislation out which we’re consulting on. I intend to have it in Parliament over the next month. The objective of the legislation is to put in place new obligations on what we call the scam ecosystem. That’s the means by which the scammers are connecting to their victims and obviously the banks, which is the wallet at the end of a transaction. So, scams don’t generally originate from or in a bank, they generally come to us by a telecommunications network or a social media platform. So, that’s why they’re key to the prevention mechanism. New obligations to prevent, prevent, detect, disrupt, report and respond to scams and redress mechanisms for consumers in there as well.
ELLIOTT:
Redress is interesting. Does that mean it would be the banks that might have to repay money lost through scams, or maybe the likes of Telstra?
JONES:
Really important point here. The situation we have at the moment, it’s all grey. If you lose money in a scam and you’ve lost money from your bank account, but you never authorise that withdrawal of money, then you’ve got a means of redress. But of course, most scams at the moment involve the customer at some point in the chain authorising a payment, and it’s unclear. So, this new prevention mechanism will put new obligations on telcos, social media platforms and banks. If they don’t meet those obligations, then there is a mechanism for redress for a consumer, either through the Financial Complaints Authority, which is a tribunal, it’s not a legalistic process or new avenues of redress through the court that don’t exist at the moment. So, internal and external dispute resolution processes will be mandatory. Your listeners will be thinking, well, I’ve got a complaint with a social media platform, who do I call? That’s a real problem at the moment. So, new internal dispute resolution processes will be mandated. If they don’t get your issue resolved, then through the Financial Complaints Authority, you’ll have the ability to make a complaint and seek redress.
ELLIOTT:
The only thing is there are literally every day tens of thousands – probably millions of attempted scams. Now, I would get half a dozen text messages a day. You know, we don’t think you’ve paid your toll bill, go to myGov and do something, whatever. They’re all scams. Now, sadly, some people fall prey to these. But I mean, will this complaints authority, or, you know, will it have the personnel, the call lines, all the infrastructure needed to deal with what will be a huge number of reported scams?
JONES:
Yeah, we’re staffing it up, but the plan that we’re putting in place will seek to block, stop, prevent those scams happening in the first place. So, a lot of those calls that you’re talking about or the SMS’s you’re talking about just getting a whole heap more of those out of the system by having better systems in place to block them in the first place. Some will get through, okay, some will get through. There’s no doubt about that. Having mechanisms to block and stop is the first thing. But yes, we will staff up the Financial Complaints Authority so they’re staffed up and have processes in plaint to deal with what we expect to be a significant increase in their caseload.
ELLIOTT:
Just quickly. I mean, what about Telstra? For example – like a lot of people, I’m a Telstra customer and I actually make an effort. Whenever I get a scam text, I report it as spam or scam. Same when I get, you know, phone numbers – phone calls from odd numbers, I actually ring them back and usually it says this number doesn’t exist. So, clearly that’s a scam. I report it. I mean, will you be, you know, will Telstra have an obligation, if people are reporting these, to do something about it, to block that number or to make sure that that text message doesn’t get sent to anybody ever again?
JONES:
Yeah, great point. So, through the new National Anti‑Scam Centre, there’ll be an obligation on companies like Telstra and Optus and all the phone carriers, plus others, to share that information through the National Anti‑Scam Centre. So, real‑time reporting and sharing of that information. So, it’s not only Telstra that knows that there’s a scam coming from a particular number, but the other carriers as well and we can block those numbers at source. It’s a game of Whack‑A‑Mole. So, one of the other things we’re doing, you probably would have received those texts from somebody pretending to be a bank or impersonating a common brand name ‑
ELLIOTT:
Or myGov or CityLink or anything like that.
JONES:
Yeah. At worst, they drive us nuts. I’m sorry, at best, they drive us nuts. At worst, people are losing money or information as a result of it. So, another mechanism we’re putting in place is – think of it as a whitelist. At the moment we’ve got a blacklist where we’re notified a number, it’s knocked on the head. But that is a game of Whack‑A‑Mole. The whitelist will apply, if you want to send a mass SMS out with the name of a bank pretending to – in the name of a bank, in the name of the post office, in the name of a well known and recognised brand, you’ll have to be on a register. And unless you’re on the register, you won’t be able to send a name, a message out with that text [indistinct].
ELLIOTT:
And very quickly, I know you’ve got to get it through Parliament all the rest of it, but for the victims or consumers, just everyday people. When does all this happen? When is it all in place and ready to go?
JONES:
I want to get it through Parliament before the next election, so I’ll have it in Parliament this year. If everything goes well, we get it through Parliament, it’s an enacted this year. That would be the best case scenario. And that way we can have those protections in place for consumers from early next year.
ELLIOTT:
When’s the election, by the way?
JONES:
Above my pay grade, sometime around about May next year would be my best bet. But, yeah, I want to get this up and running. Scams are running at about $3 billion in losses a year. That’s far too much. We’ve got to do more to protect Australians.
ELLIOTT:
I agree. All right, sounds good. We’ll talk again soon. Stephen Jones there, Assistant federal Treasurer.