Scams: Consumer advocates call for action after devastating cost from fraudsters, scammers revealed

Sylvia Chou clicked a link on Facebook and three months later, she had lost $2.6 million to scammers.

The advertisement for a currency trading platform was a sophisticated scam that wiped out her savings, and led to her borrowing money and refinancing her three properties.

The 57-year-old accountant from the NSW central coast said her bank, NAB, had tried to call her about the unusual activity on her account, but when they couldn’t reach her “they just left it at that”.

“They shouldn’t just tick a box and say they made the call ? they definitely have the systems to detect unusual banking behaviour,” she said.

Ms Chou, who is now an anti-scam advocate, said latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing a sharp rise in card fraud and scams underestimated the true scale of the problem.

The bureau’s personal fraud survey, released on Wednesday, found one in ten Australians have fallen victim to fraud involving credit, debit, and EFTPOS cards.

Consumer advocates say the figures reveal “a stark picture that is getting even worse” and the next federal government must take urgent action to address the growth in scams.

Card fraud affected 9.9 per cent of Australians in 2023-24, increasing from 8.7 per cent in the previous year, while the number of people who engaged with scammers also rose to 675,300 people, up from 514,300.

But the ABS numbers were “way below” the true figures, Ms Chou said.

She had spoken to many scam victims who had poor English and did not report their experiences.

William Milne, the bureau’s head of crime statistics, said 72 per cent of card fraud victims were fully reimbursed by their card issuer, with the gross amount stolen totalling $2.1 billion.

“Collectively, the net loss to all victims after any reimbursements were paid out was $477 million,” he said.

Buying or selling scams, which includes practices such as false billing and online shopping scams, were the most common form of scams, experienced by about 308,000 people.

Consumer Action Law Centre chief executive Stephanie Tonkin said the data showed hundreds of thousands of victims being robbed in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.

“What concerns me is the artificial distinction between victims of fraud and scams,” she said.

While most banks reimbursed fraud victims, people who were scammed had been treated like second-class citizens, reimbursed a paltry 5 per cent per cent or less, she said.

The next government must make scams an urgent priority and designate the banking, telco and digital platform sectors under the Scams Prevention Framework, Ms Tonkin said.