Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones takes aim at online scammers

“There will be more friction,” Jones said, despite consumers increasingly seeking faster real-time payments. “Not directly, but for some things, and it’ll be risk-based.”

Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) deputy chair Sarah Court said people were increasingly being tricked into rolling entire superannuation savings into funds in the names of criminals.

‘What we’re seeing on a daily and tragic basis is that people are rolling their life savings into things they think are investments.’

ASIC deputy chair Sarah Court

“What we’re seeing on a daily and tragic basis is that people are rolling their life savings into things they think are investments, particularly increasingly so in the superannuation area.”

Court said while Australia was one of the few jurisdictions in the world that had managed to persuade Google to take a harder stance against scammers, the corporate regulator hadn’t made headway with other media platforms.

“We’ve engaged with Google, and they’ve given us a public commitment in relation to investment scams that they will not advertise on Google investment products if the advertiser doesn’t have an Australian Financial Services license,” she said.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t had any success with Facebook and some of the other social media platforms.”

Court said codes and mandatory obligations were “perhaps the answer” given ASIC’s lack of success with platforms such as Facebook.

Banks have also repeatedly complained about social media platforms running ads for investment scams, which are by far the largest source of scam losses, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch website.

A spokesperson for Meta, which owns and operates social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram, said scammers presented a challenge in many environments, including social media.

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“Meta is constantly tackling scams through a combination of technology, such as new machine learning techniques and specially trained reviewers, to identify content and accounts that violate our policies,” they said. “We are currently also working across industries and with the government to identify new ways to stop scammers.”

Catriona Lowe, chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), said scams were constantly evolving with organised criminals taking advantage of events such as the FIFA Women’s World Cup and impersonating authorities. “These are not in guys in the back shed,” she said. “They have HR departments and car parks.”

However, she said a number of anti-scam measures had led to September being the lowest single month of reported investment scam since October 2020. “That is, frankly, a quicker bending of that curve than I expected to see,” she said.