Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a group of eager and very well educated seniors at the Probus Club of Main Ridge in my beautiful electorate of Flinders. They had invited me to come along and speak about parenting in the age of social media, but our conversation quickly progressed to all things 'tech for good' and sometimes things 'tech for bad'. I was left with the now familiar feeling that we have not quite done enough to equip our seniors with the skills that they need not only for the digitised world into which they have been thrown so completely in a post-COVID life but especially in respect of the risk of online scamming.

Scamming is doing untold damage to many of the community based values that underpin what is so beautiful about living in Australia: our trusted institutions, our faith in other people, honesty, generosity, self-reliance and, above all else, self-confidence. Today scams impact everyone. No-one is spared. Not the tech savvy, the highly educated, the financially savvy or the circumspect are spared. Among my constituents who have fallen victim to scams are retired doctors, soldiers, accountants and small-business owners. The scammers are very sophisticated. They can teach a 90-year-old normally stumped by myGov or iview to download remote-access technology in minutes, laying bare their financial tools and passwords to the scammers' manipulation. From the data, we know that the elderly are at much greater risk of being scammed. Those over 75 are 50 per cent more likely to be scammed than those just 10 years younger.

No-one should feel ashamed falling into the trap. Indeed last night, I listened to a podcast by Ryan Pullen, director of cybersecurity at the SANS Institute. You would think at least he would be safe from scamming. But, in his TED Talk that was released overnight, he describes how a few weeks ago he received a phone call at around 8 pm. The person on the other end knew his name, his address and his mother's maiden name. The number he was called from was the fraud number for his own bank, and, when he googled the names of his interlocutors, he found them on LinkedIn as employees of his bank. He had the good sense though, while on hold, to simultaneously call the bank's fraud line from another phone and ask them to add a special note to his account. When he asked the fraudulent interlocutor what that note said, he sensed a moment of hesitation and a slight flummox and he ended the call, blocked all his accounts and changed all his bank cards. This man's professional life is cybersecurity, yet he went down the rabbit hole for an hour and a half until he managed to make two simultaneous calls and set a trap for the fraudster. This was only facilitated because his actual bank picked up the phone and he reached an actual human in real time at 9 o'clock at night.

When you ring a fraud line at 9 o'clock at night in Australia, you don't always get a human and certainly not in real time. More often, it's a digitised interface giving little if any reassurance to the caller that the remedial steps that they seek have actually been put in place. This is made infinitely worse by the ongoing closure of bank branches across regional areas and even so-called metropolitan areas like mine, which denies concerned customers the option of turning up and shutting down their bank accounts or at least seeking advice face to face.

Billions of dollars are lost to scammers every year. In 2022, Australians lost a combined $3.1 billion to scams, an increase of an enormous 80 per cent from 2021. If home burglaries went up by 80 per cent in one year, we would have a significant increase in on-ground police forces, community awareness campaigns and measures to make people feel safe. But, at the moment, Australia is lacking the tools to stop scams happening. In the words of one of the big four banks that I met with recently on this topic, Australia is an easy target.

Last week, I met with the Australian Banking Association, who told me about the scam safe accord they have developed with their member banks and implemented last November. While I truly thank them for their efforts and note recent moves by the government to address this scam scourge more comprehensively, there is so much more we can do to immediately to help people, particularly the elderly, in a proactive, supportive, customer service oriented way. Banks could inform elderly customers, for example, of the risks they face, not just by advertising online or putting it on social media but by writing to their homes and suggesting they install appropriate security measures. They can even recommend the original two-factor authentication, requiring for all significant transactions the authority of the elderly customer and a trusted family member. Our response is too slow, too complex and not customer focused enough to make our citizens feel safe. We have much more to do.

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