Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pride to belong to a government that's bringing this type of legislation into the House. I think the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 is something that both sides of the House are very supportive of. All of us value receiving text messages, emails and phone calls from friends, family, colleagues, business associates and companies that provide us with information, the products that we need for our work and the services that we need to go about our daily lives. Whether it's a quick hello on the phone, news of a particular sale that's taking place or a gentle reminder about an upcoming appointment, these messages keep us connected and informed.

There's also another type of message and text message and email that none of us want to receive, and that's the one that leads to financial loss. We've heard many examples here today from both sides of the House of thousands and thousands of dollars of financial loss, of hardworking Australians' cash lost through text messages, emails, the internet and the whole range of tools and mechanisms that these scammers use. Unfortunately, these scams are all too common nowadays. Each and every one of us in this House has seen constituents that have been scammed and have come to see us seeking retribution or seeking to recover their money.

The scammers target individuals with these deceitful messages, pretending that they're legitimate communications from a bank, a government agency, telecommunications companies or even Australia Post. I get one regularly—a text message every night at about midnight from 'Australia Post' saying that my parcel is being delivered and to put in some numbers and names. They're gathering information. I know that it's not Australia Post because I've got nothing to be delivered at this point, nor have I ordered anything. You can report them. As you delete that message, we now have a system that comes up automatically and says, 'Would you like to report this as a scam message?' You press the button, and off it goes. I did report it, and I've never received another one since. But they're very elaborate. They will morph and form into a different type of message. That's just one example.

You see, the Australia Post logo is very well respected. It's something that has been part of our lives all our lives. You see it, you trust it, you believe it. The reality is that we should be very careful with what we click on. We should be very careful when we respond to text messages from entities that perhaps are not our family, our friends or people that we know. Sometimes we're all too eager to click and see where it takes us to. The one bit of advice that I can give and that most people have heard today is to take a short breath. If you're not sure, don't click on it. If there's something that you feel unsure about, speak to someone else about it, and if it seems too good to be true it most probably is too good to be true. That's an old saying that goes way back. I think our gut instincts sometimes tell us that things are not quite right.

Recently, in Adelaide I've had a couple of forums. We had a seniors forum where one of the sessions was on scams and protecting people. And the other forum was one I held in my electorate of Adelaide with the Assistant Treasurer and a very good friend of mine, Stephen Jones. I'll take this opportunity to wish him all the very best after his announcement. He's done an absolutely outstanding job as Assistant Treasurer. One of his targets has been scammers, and, as I said, he's done an exceptional job with the legislation and with weeding these scammers out.

At that second forum we had approximately 100 people in the room, and we spoke to the residents of Adelaide about how these scams affect individuals and the community. It was striking that, when the Assistant Treasurer asked the audience if they had ever received a scam phone call, text or email, every single person in the room put their hand up. And each and every person had a story to tell. What was even more astounding was when we asked the question of everyone in the room, 'Who has been directly affected by a scam or knows someone that has, whether they're a part of your family or someone very close to you?' and two-thirds of the hands in the room went up, approximately 70-odd people out of 100. That was astonishing. It goes to show that every single person either has been touched by it or knows someone that has been scammed. That's why the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 is very important. It amends the Competition and Consumer Act to establish the Scams Prevention Framework to prevent and respond to scams that impact on the Australian community.

At our seniors forum in Adelaide we had over 200 people attend, and we did a special session on scams. Again, the same questions were asked, and it was approximately the same ratio. Pretty well everyone in the room put their hand up to say that they knew of someone that had been impacted or that they themselves had received text messages or emails.

There were some great examples that day of how elaborate these scammers are, and there was one which they spoke to us about. It was a billing scam. A gentleman who was there spoke about his son, who was a tradie. His son would buy equipment from different suppliers to conduct his trade in the building industry, and every month they would send him an account, and he would pay that account directly into the BSB and bank account of the supplier of the goods. One month he got the account with the same letterhead and everything. He looked up the BSB number, and he'd been told it had been changed. So he sent off the payment to this particular bank account, only to receive the following month a reminder bill from his normal supplier saying, 'You haven't paid the bill.' He was up in arms, obviously, as you can just imagine. He pulled out his records, sent them the details and said: 'This is where I've paid it. Here's the BSB number'. It was the wrong BSB number.

It was not because he made a mistake but because someone, though an elaborate phishing system, had been able to get the supplier's details and letterheads and change the bank account and the BSB numbers. So that money went into a scammer's account. By the time they got on to the police, the police were investigating it, but the scammers had taken the money and disappeared, and they would have done this to hundreds of other people. So, again, be very careful. When you're paying your bills and you just get a BSB number, check with the supplier, check with the person you're paying, to make sure that it is correct. This was another elaborate way of siphoning money from people. This poor chap, his father was telling us, not only lost thousands of dollars to scammers but also still needed to pay the bill to the correct suppliers, another added cost that was about to take him under. Because of that extra burden, he may not have been able to survive the following month. That's one example.

Another one that appeared recently, certainly in South Australia, in my home state—it was reported in the Advertiser, the local paper in Adelaide—was the scanning codes. I'm sure it's happening all over the country. When I read about it, I sent the article immediately to the Assistant Treasurer. This is where you walk into a restaurant and you view your menu or, perhaps, you're paying your parking meter and you scan the code and these scammers create their own codes and go and put them on top of the code in that premises or on the parking meter or wherever it may be. Therefore, when you scan, you're scanning into their website, which then tells you where to send money et cetera or to pay the bill. This then goes into the scammer's pocket.

We know that they're getting more and more elaborate and we know that overseas there are such things as scam factories. We would have all seen on 60 Minutes late last year the investigation that they did into an Asian country where up to 120 people were working in what's called a scam factory. This is where people are on the phones, calling internationally, all over the world, trying to find people that they can scam. It was a very elaborate set-up. Many of these people were brought in from Third World countries, were basically working like slaves and were beaten et cetera in these factories.

I would suggest to anyone who hasn't seen this episode of 60 Minutes to watch it. It would have been around October of last year, where they did extremely good investigative reporting and traced back money that had been scammed through these factories here in Australia, in the US and in the UK. It was everything from dating services and love stories to elaborate money-making schemes. What these people would do is ring and ring and gain the confidence of the other person on the phone until they were able to extract the money out of them. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. In one case, a woman from the UK had been scammed out of her entire life savings of over 100,000 pounds. It's very elaborate. Again, it's about being cautious. If there is something that is too good to be true, it usually is.

Recently, I was contacted by constituents who were having a big family wedding. They had an extended family. Part of their family lived in the US, and they wanted these particular family members to come over to Australia for the wedding. They applied for the visa and they were knocked back. This was for an Australian visa through the home affairs department website. They could not work out why they had been knocked back. They were an elderly couple. They had their own retirement plan and pension, and they were fairly well off in the US. They were coming over for a wedding, for a two-week stay, and then going back.

We looked into it, and they told us about the responses they got from the application on the Home Affairs page. When we contacted Home Affairs on their behalf and gave them the details—the emails they had received—we were informed by Home Affairs that it was a scam site that they were using. They paid about US$190 to apply for the visa—this amount does not exist; I think the fee for a visa is miniscule—and they had been scammed. When they kept on going back into this website, it would send them a scam email saying, 'Your visa application for an e-visitor visa is being considered.' So it was all about delay. Every email they got was about delay. These would have been done on AI—very robotic and very elaborate. We were finally informed by Home Affairs that this was a scam website that many people had fallen for in the US. Apparently it has disappeared. We finally did get the visa for the visitors to come to Australia to enjoy the wedding with their family—after they'd lost US$190 for three different family members, which is a very sad case.

These laws are very welcome. They are welcome because we need to put laws in place to be able to make it difficult for scammers. We know that we'll never get rid of them completely because they are very elaborate and, with the intricate computer systems et cetera, we know that they will just keep on morphing into something new. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant and on top of it. We should be chasing them and hunting them down to ensure that money is not scammed from innocent Australians. We've seen far too much—far too many scams. This Scams Prevention Framework Bill will go a long way in assisting, and I suspect that, in years to come, we'll have to continue looking at this bill, amending it and making it even tougher and harder for those scammers.

The bill introduces principles based obligations that require regulated entities also to take certain actions in relation to scams. We're talking about the financial institutions: the banks and insurance companies. They have a responsibility as well to prevent, detect and, very importantly, report—we found that many scams were going unreported—and to disrupt and respond to scams relating to services that that particular entity provides. Contraventions of their obligations may result in civil penalties, as well. It's important to get that message through.

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