A line of defence against scams

Australians reported a record 601,000 of scams last year, up from the 507,000 reported in 2022, with losses totalling $2.7 billion, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch.

The good news is advancements in technology and improved customer education are starting to make a difference in detecting and preventing scams. Australians reported $82.1 million in losses to Scamwatch in the three months to December, down 43 per cent from the same quarter in 2022.

Part of this defence is the central role our dedicated frontline staff play. As the name suggests, they are at the forefront for many interactions with our customers and are trained to identify when something is not right with a particular transaction.

Warning signs

Staff like Cameron Reid, a banking consultant at the ANZ branch in Sunbury, about half an hour north of Melbourne, are well versed to spot the signals.

“It’s not so much factual, it’s more of the customer’s behaviour. They’ll be nervous, agitated or they’ll be trying to rush a transaction,” Cameron says.

He had a case with a customer recently who said she had a boyfriend in New Zealand she’d met through social media who was making increasingly urgent financial demands.  

“He said he needed to get into her internet banking so he could fly to meet her in Australia. She was nervous, she was fidgety and she was rushing me,” Cameron says. “The phone calls were coming in from this boyfriend during this conversation and he was asking ‘have you got it yet’?”.

“I asked whether she’d physically met this man, and she said no. In the end I told her I don’t believe this man is in New Zealand. She started crying and I told her we will help.”

The extensive planning and resources that go into these scams has also accelerated in recent years. Through a process called “social engineering”, scammers may work on their targets for months – slowly garnering their trust and even coaching them on what to say to the bank.

One such case was spotted by our staff member Jeanette from the Werribee Plaza branch in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Jeanette was able to help a customer who’d fallen victim to a sophisticated scam through social media.

“I first asked him how much he wanted to send and he said $20,000. The person on the phone had told him a truck would come to his home and give him $300,000,” Jeanette recalls. “What government body would do that? I thought. He said ‘I’ve spoken to my friends on Facebook. They did the same thing. They received the money.”

“I said, ‘do you realise it’s not your friends talking to you? This could be anybody’, and I think that’s when it clicked for him.”

Pressure tactics

In these situations, it can be very difficult to convince customers they may be the victim of a scam. Our staff are trained to treat these situations delicately because many times the victims are emotionally invested in what they think is a budding romance or an investment opportunity of a lifetime.

Anybody can fall victim to a scam, but these criminals do tend to target older Australians given they are likely to have more accumulated savings. And they quite often pressure their targets to act quickly. They don’t want victims to stop and think about their actions.

Our staff member from Sunbury, Cameron, saw this recently when an elderly gentleman came to make a deposit relating to an urgent opportunity to buy real estate that was “too good to miss out on.” Cameron’s first question was, where’s with the contract of sale?

“He didn’t have any of that. He had a screwed-up piece of paper that looked like a napkin, with some numbers written on it,” Cameron says.

In some cases, scammers are now sending couriers or Uber drivers to people’s houses to collect cash or their credit card.

“The fact scammers can arrange an Uber to go to the customer’s address to pick up $5,000 cash tells me the scammers could be in the next suburb or the next street,” Cameron says. “They could be someone you went to school with, someone at your footy club… Our role is to educate and prevent this as much as possible.”

Staff members like Cameron and Jeanette are a valuable line of defence as we search for a community wide response to combatting scams.

Kath Bray is Managing Director Customer Engagement, Australia Retail at ANZ