Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Scammers are the scum of our society. They are ruining lives and ripping people off. These criminals aren't wearing balaclavas or wielding a crowbar. Instead, they are sitting anonymously behind their computer screens or at the end of a phone line, often in countries far from here. Every one of us in this place will have met a constituent who has lost extraordinary sums of money to these scammers, and their stories are heartbreaking. As their federal MP, I have been trying to do everything I can to help them get their money back, but in many of these cases, there's very little that can be done for them once the money has been taken. I have been hearing of people who have lost huge amounts of money because they've clicked on a link or they've answered the desperate calls of someone who they thought was their daughter who was in distress and they then sent some money off. It has been so sad to hear about the impact this has had on them.

While scams have been around for a long time, in the last few years they have gotten more sophisticated and more damaging. As technology has advanced, so too have scammers. With more and more of our personal and financial information being stored online, this has meant more opportunities for theft, and none of us are immune from these scams. The stereotype of someone who would get scammed is often someone who's a bit older and maybe not as digitally savvy, but a 2023 Deloitte survey found that, actually, it was those in the gen Z and millennial cohorts who were more likely to be scammed than their grandparents. Scammers have become so sophisticated that they managed to convince a financial advice columnist for a New York magazine to put $50,000 cash in a box and hand it to a stranger because she thought that person was a CIA agent. This is the level of sophistication that we are now getting to. The piece that she wrote about her experience went viral online because people were sharing their own stories about how they had been scammed.

We have heard of similar experiences from people coming to my office. There was a public school teacher who was scammed of $50,000. There was a young man who had been working to save up for a deposit on his first home. He lost the entire deposit. These are heartbreaking stories, but what is the government doing to help protect citizens against these scams? This bill, the Telecommunications Amendment (SMS Sender ID Register) Bill 2024, is part of a broader suite of measures that the government is working on that are designed to crack down on scammers and reduce scamming losses right across the country. I'm really proud of the work that the Labor government is doing, because we have made this a significant priority in helping to protect Australians.

Foremost in the government's push has been establishing the National Anti-Scam Centre. This is a unique centre that is the first of its kind in taking a proactive approach to fight fraud and scams. It's an innovative partnership that unites government agencies, law enforcement and businesses to deploy cutting-edge technology to block scams right at the source. Importantly, the National Anti-Scam Centre has an education function as well. It will empower communities and individuals by raising awareness and providing practical tips to safeguard against scammers.

The initial findings of the Albanese government's crackdown on scammers have shown some promising results. According to the National Anti-Scam Centre's second quarterly report, scam losses in the period October to December 2023 have almost halved in comparison to the same period just the year prior. Prior to the Albanese government taking office, annual scam losses in Australia exceeded $3 billion, a quadrupling over three years. The amount of $3 billion that was being taken out of people's pockets obviously had a huge impact on their lives, and that problem was growing exponentially before we came to government.

Since our government's intervention, this trend has reversed. In the first six months of the crackdown, we saw significant reductions, with reporting for November 2023 showing a 50 per cent decrease in losses compared to the previous year. This means that the work that we are doing is having an impact. However, we are still losing too much money, and people's lives are still getting damaged by scammers, and we know that there is a lot more work to do.

What I am doing at the local level is ensuring that my community has a good understanding of what scams look like and how they can protect themselves against being scammed. It was a great morning when we held our seniors morning tea recently. The Assistant Treasurer, Stephen Jones, came along to Burwood Public School to speak to seniors directly about how they can protect themselves and their families from being scammed. We had about 150 people in the hall that day, and the Assistant Treasurer asked members of the audience to put their hand up if they had received a scam text, email or online message, and almost everyone in the audience put their hand up. He then asked if anyone knew of anyone who had been scammed, and there were people who still had their hands up. Everyone in that audience had had some interaction with a scammer. That's the unfortunate state of affairs that we currently live in.

But it's not just individuals and families who are vulnerable to scams; it's also businesses. So I invited the then minister for home affairs, Clare O'Neil, to join a small business forum that I held, along with Realeyes business, who had an expert cybersecurity speaker there, to help inform small businesses about how they can protect themselves and their customers from hacks and from being scammed. We want to make sure that we do everything we can to reduce the losses from scams and to make sure that individuals, families and small businesses are not vulnerable to these criminal activities.

It's important to make sure that we minimise the avenues for scammers to approach our community via SMS and MMS, as well as online. According to the department, SMS is now the most frequently reported contact method for scams. As the 'Fighting SMS scams: what type of SMS sender ID registry should be introduced in Australia?' consultation paper has noted, we've all become accustomed to receiving SMSs from businesses and organisations that we trust.

It's estimated that $27 million was lost in scams in 2023 alone, but this figure is likely to be an underestimation, as many scams go unreported. That's why in April 2023, the government announced the establishment of an SMS sender register, alongside the creation of the National Anti-Scam Centre that sits within the ACCC. These measures were complemented by rules introduced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which require companies to block scam text messages. We know that during the period from July to December 2022, telcos blocked more than 90 million scam texts. That's 90 million scam texts. We were getting these multiple times a day. This government knows that we have to keep building on protections for our community, and this is what this bill does.

The establishment of the SMS Sender ID Registry is designed to fundamentally undermine the business model of SMS scammers. It will help to prevent scammers from impersonating brands and organisations and will start to restore public confidence in SMS as a communications channel. Under a potentially mandatory model, all organisations sending text messages with letter based sender IDs to Australian mobile phones would need to register these IDs. This would apply to both Australian and overseas senders. Phone companies would also have to follow new regulations which would require them to either block messages from unregistered senders or add a warning label to these messages saying that they might be scams. For the person receiving the SMS, this would prevent people from receiving a SMS from scammers claiming to be a particular company or organisation. It would allow receivers of a SMS to trust that when a text message says it's from the ATO it is actually from the ATO. Where an entity is not registered, it would require the telcos to send a scam warning alongside it.

There's more work for us to do, but we've already started the really important work of helping to safeguard our community from these scammers. Education is the big piece here to ensure that individuals are not susceptible to falling prey to these scammers. I'm going to continue to hold antiscam forums across my community to help individuals and small businesses keep on the lookout for these scam messages.

If there's anything that I can leave the community with it's that there are three simple things you can do to help protect yourself. The first is to ensure that you have a complicated password by trying to use a passphrase instead of a password. The second is to ensure that you have two-factor authentication; you can set that up to ensure that it is much harder for scammers to access your banking or financial details. The third is to check: if someone were to send you an email or a SMS, instead of clicking through to the link, call the organisation or institution that is trying to get in contact with you. The one thing Lillian, who came to my seniors morning tea where Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones was speaking about the problem of scams, took out of that antiscam forum was: do not click on the blue link in that email or SMS. In the words of Lillian: 'Keep that in mind. Do not click on the blue link.'

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