Telecommunications giants, banks and government agencies are banding together to put a stop to scam callers.
Sydney fashion designer Melanie Gillbank was caught off-guard by a scam caller who impersonated a Commonwealth Bank fraud officer and asked for a Netbank code.
“The minute I read it out, my heart sank and I realised I’d made a mistake,” Gillbank said.
She lost $5000 to the scammer but was lucky to get her money back from the bank once she realised she had been the victim of a crime.
Now, Call Stop, a collaboration between telco provider Optus and the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange is looking to put an end to call-related scams.
The partnership intercepts phone calls to scam numbers with a warning message if the number has been reported as involved in a con.
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More than 1300 scam attempts have been stopped in the first ten weeks of the program.
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“That will translate to tens of millions of dollars of theft that we’ve already prevented,” Optus spokesperson Andrew Sheridan told 9News.
“The idea is to stay one step ahead of the criminals.”
Commonwealth Bank and Telstra have also recently rolled out a tool to block suspicious bank transfers while a potential scam call is in progress.
Australian consumers have already lost $92 million to scammers since the start of the year, the ACCC has confirmed.
The volume of scam phone calls has decreased, however, spoof text messages have risen in frequency, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
A national register will be put into place this year to protect the sender IDs of big corporations, such as Australia Post, myGov and the major banks.
”Consumers will then be able to have greater confidence, that if they receive a message that says it’s from their bank – it is in fact from their bank,” executive general manager for the ACCC’s National Anti-Scam Centre, Heidi Snell, said.
