Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the member for Holt's motion regarding the scourge of scams in our community. I do support the government's commitment to combat scams through investment in a whole-of-government approach. However, I continue to hear from people in my electorate of Kooyong who have, through no fault of their own, lost thousands—and, occasionally, millions—of dollars to organised criminals in sophisticated scams. So I'm concerned that the government's claims of success in addressing this issue may have been overstated.

The National Anti-Scam Centre data is likely only the tip of the scams iceberg. It only captures those scams which are reported to the ACCC's Scamwatch, a process involving a time-consuming online form. It doesn't include scams reported solely to other agencies, such as the police, the banks or even the telcos. In fact, ABS data for the 2023 financial year indicates that only 8.7 per cent of people who experience a scam report it to a government organisation or department. Furthermore, the NASC quarterly report likely underreports small-scale scams which affect large groups of Australians. These are scams like online buying and selling schemes; these are on the rise compared to investment scams, which are in decline. And compared to the September 2020 third quarter, scams in culturally and linguistically diverse communities are up by 82 per cent. I'm really concerned that not enough is being done to protect vulnerable communities, such as the 31,000 Chinese Australians in my electorate.

Clearly, the problem of scams has not gone away, so I'm calling on the government to do more: firstly, by introducing a mandatory contingent reimbursement scheme for banks to ensure that blameless scam victims are fully reimbursed; and, secondly, by ensuring that scammers can no longer impersonate the telephone numbers of legitimate businesses and agencies, particularly banks. The Australian Communication and Media Authority, ACMA, is implementing a voluntary SMS sender ID registry. I feel this registry has to be mandatory for organisations that use SMS sender IDs. For example, HSBC customers have been targeted by sophisticated bank impersonation scams since at least April 2023.

Recently I was alarmed to learn that HSBC's phone number in Australia is still in use by scammers who continue to pray on citizens, like the couple from Canterbury in my electorate, who were recently defrauded of nearly $50,000 after receiving a phone call from someone who claimed to work for the HSBC fraud team. My constituent said: 'He was very convincing and very well spoken. He knew my name, number, transaction limit, and the last four digits of my credit card number. He knew information that only the bank could know. So there was no reason for me to believe that I was talking to anyone other than the HSBC.' The scammer sent text messages to her. These appeared to be from HSBC, as they were on the same text thread as the previous messages she had received from the bank. He took control of the account and then conducted unauthorised transactions. His ability to do so relates not to any failure of my constituent but to the lack of security features at HSBC. Her husband was alerted to the unusual transaction and he called HSBC straightaway asking them to suspend their accounts. That was four minutes after the first initial fraudulent transfer. It was only minutes before a second fraudulent transfer, which still went through.

My constituents report that HSBC has consistently ignored the request for an update on their case in recent times and that they've waited more than two months to be assigned a case manager at AFCA. That is not reflective of a functional scam response system. The government's efforts to tackle scams are encouraging, no doubt. But we have to do more to strengthen our banking and telecommunication systems, resist the growing levels of organised crime behind scams, protect our constituents and give them back their faith, not just in our banks but also in our telecommunications systems. These changes have to include mandates for our banks to always act effectively and resolutely to protect their customers.

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