Collaboration is our best defence against scammers

The past decade has seen an increase in activity from organised criminals worldwide stealing money through scams.

Until recently, financial losses from scams reported by Australians had followed a growth trajectory that dated back to 2012. This trend came to a halt in 2023, when losses fell by 13 percent to $2.7 billion, according to the ACCC and its National Anti-Scam Centre (NASC).

While losses are still unacceptably high, this dip is a signal that anti-scam innovations deployed by the banks, along with other key players in the ecosystem, are helping to protect more Australians, says James Roberts, CommBank General Manager of Group Fraud.

Among CommBank’s customers, Roberts says scam losses more than halved during the last financial year, an encouraging drop that was helped by the bank’s suite of anti-scam initiatives – from policies to help halt payments to scam cryptocurrency accounts and customer education initiatives, to new technologies such as CommBank’s ‘CallerCheck’ in-app caller verification and ‘NameCheck’ security tool.

But he says more work is needed, and to truly rein in the threat, banks are just one part of the solution.

"Customer scam losses more than halved during the last financial year, an encouraging drop that was helped by the bank’s suite of anti-scam initiatives."

Scams often reach consumers through social media videos, search engine ads, text messages, and voice calls, so tackling this issue requires a collaborative approach. Banks, telcos and tech platforms – as well as governments, law enforcement agencies and others – must work together, share knowledge and insights, and form partnerships to detect and prevent scams.

“We're all part of the ecosystem, so pressure needs to be applied across that ecosystem – so there is less money that needs to be sent to scammers, less to chase, and Australians are safer.”

Demonstrating the power of anti-scam collaborations across sectors, Roberts cites CommBank’s partnerships with major telecommunication companies, which have yielded innovative anti-scam technologies for the benefit of the partners’ mutual customers.

CommBank’s partnership with Quantium Telstra to create the AI-powered ‘Scam Indicator’ tool highlights their efforts to detect high-risk phone scams. This tool helps prevent criminals from tricking customers into transferring money while they are on the phone and has been particularly successful in catching remote access scams. Additionally, the ‘Call Stop’ technology, developed by Optus, has already blocked over 470,000 bank impersonation scams as a result of the SMS scam content CBA shared with Optus. CommBank and Vodafone are also sharing SMS scam intelligence with each other in near real-time to disrupt scammers and help block fraudulent payments proactively.

These are among a growing pipeline of collaborative efforts the bank is pursuing, which includes a recently unveiled partnership with Macquarie University and its AI-focused spinout, APATE.AI. In this latest and Australian-first pilot, conversational AI-powered anti-scam bots will help to extract scam intelligence and combat scam phone calls.

“By bringing to the table some of the brightest minds – across telcos, other banks, social media platforms, academics and technologists – we can generate more of these cutting-edge solutions to this very nasty societal problem,” Roberts says. “While in most areas we’re generally in fierce competition with our peers, this is one area in which targeted collaboration and sharing of intellectual property can deliver benefits to customers.”

The disruption of scams at a national level is poised to accelerate through the recently formed ‘Anti-Scams Intelligence Loop’. Coordinated by the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) and funded by the four major banks, the idea behind the loop is to speed up intelligence sharing among ecosystem players – for example, when a bank customer reports a dodgy road toll link, the link can be shared very quickly through the loop – with the relevant telco to block any further content being shared more widely; with big tech players to block access to the underlying websites; and with the National Anti-Scam Centre (NASC) to take down the scam website.

“To date, a number of organisations have signed up to the loop and are sharing data, including the first of the big social media companies, Meta,” Roberts says. “But it’s still early days. The focus now is for members to real time integrate with the loop using APIs – rather than the current manual processes – so there is no delay on providing, ingesting and acting on intelligence.

“CommBank was the first entity to integrate with the intel loop, and at last count, we've shared more than 1,500 dodgy SMS links and social media profiles with other ecosystem players via the intel loop. As more organisations do the same, especially telcos and the other social platforms, intelligence sharing via the intel loop will increase and cause real damage to the profit model of scammers”.

“CommBank was the first entity to integrate with the intel loop, and at last count, we've shared more than 1,500 dodgy SMS links and social media profiles with other ecosystem players via the intel loop.”

“It’s these types of ongoing ecosystem-wide efforts that are playing a vital role in ultimately making Australia a far less desirable place for organised criminal scammers to operate,” Roberts says.