IN FEDERAL Parliament recently, the government made the claim that the number of scams in Australia is down by as much as 43 per cent for the December quarter but that certainly doesn’t ring true for personal experience.
Many of us are in fact getting several scam attempts-a-day and with the average loss from a scam at a staggering $20,000, it’s a significant loss, especially considering the average Aussie household has about $34,000 in savings.
Equally bad is that the fear of being scammed stops us from responding to otherwise legitimate contact from authorities to avoid being scammed.
One of the latest scams going around is a text message that claims “your road toll bill is overdue” and the way the road toll companies escalate the fees and charges associated with unpaid tolls, it has prompted many hundreds of people to click the link and lose their money – don’t click the link!
Two issues there; it’s too easy for criminals to take people down using messages on their phones and in the unregulated world of social media, despite what the government has claimed to achieve.
And two, how are the toll companies allowed to get away with the extortionate penalties they apply for unpaid tolls, often taking individuals to the magistrate court to recover debts that have ballooned out to thousands of dollars by late payment.
The government claimed recently that the National Anti-Scam Centre's second quarterly report shows that scam losses from October to December 2023 reduced by 43 per cent from the same quarter in 2022, and 26 per cent from the July to September 2023 quarter.
They gave themselves a big pat on the back for the results of an “$86.5 million in a coordinated, whole-of-government approach” to reducing the number of scams.
However, on the National Anti-Scam Centre's own website today it says “scams are getting harder to spot. Australians reported a record $3.1 billion lost to scams last year. That's 80 per cent more than the year before”.
That’s more like our experience.
Local MP Russell Broadbent spoke during the debate, saying his brother-in-law was prompted to make a progress payment on a new house he was building, a considerable amount, the name of the builder was right, the address, everything but the bank account details. Thankfully he checked with the builder first.
Mr Broadbent said that with more than three billion being ripped off each year, there needed to be “a whole-of-government, whole-of-banks, whole-of-telcos and whole-of-everybody-else-involved-in-it thing to make the difference.”
And we should take the advice of the Member for Kooyong, Dr Monique Ryan, who said “that only 8.7 per cent of people who experience a scam report it to a government organisation or department” and make a report online to the National Anti-Scam Centre on its Scamwatch website at scamwatch.gov.au/report-a-scam
