By Dongyun Kwon
To prevent putting more Australians at risk of scams, the Parliament of Australia passed the Scams Prevention Framework Bill on 13 February.
The Star Mail delved into the scam cases that happened locally to raise awareness of the risk of scams as well as inform the best way to solve the issue this week.
While the Star Mail crew were busy finishing up everything for the newspaper that was going to be printed the next day, an email was sent to Star Mail’s editor’s email inbox at around 11am on Monday 10 February.
In the email, Healesville resident Alan Honeycombe was asking for help.
“Would you be open to a brief email conversation?” it reads.
“I would have preferred calling, but I’m currently managing shingles, and, unfortunately, my phone screen went black after a fall.”
The Star Mail contacted Mr Honeycombe and noticed it wasn’t him who had sent the email.
His email account was hacked and the hacker sent the email to all the people in his contact list.
Mr Honeycombe said he knew about it when he got a phone call from his sisters.
“They asked me if the email, that they believed they got from me, was true,” he said.
“If you replied to this person on the other end, which was not me, that person would direct you to go and buy 10 $50 Apple vouchers at the shop that could be delivered to this person.
“That person also said my niece had breast cancer and needed money for treatment. None of them were true.”
As soon as he noticed his email account was used for scam, he sent everybody in his email address book a second message, saying that this was a scam and not to take any notice of it.
He also reported it to Telstra and called a technician to solve the issue.
Mr Honeycombe said he was not sure about what caused it but he thought it might have been caused by a suspicious email he received a couple of days before it happened.
“The email was purportedly from BigPond, asking me to put some information in to get the BigPond account sorted out,” he said.
“When I looked into it, it was not from BigPond at all, somebody else was trying to get access to my details.”
Fortunately, Mr Honeycombe said nobody took up the offer from the scammer as far as he knew of.
“I’ve had about 15 phone calls from people, checking if it was me or not,” he said.
“As far as I know, nobody’s gone down the track of losing any money.
“Be very wary of organisations or people that are pretending to be organisations that aren’t. If you look at the email address that they’ve come from, there’s usually some indication that it’s not really Telstra, bank or whatever because there’s something wrong with the email address.”
Mr Honeycombe said many scammers work on fear like ‘if you don’t do this within 24 hours, this will happen’.
“Older people, who are not familiar with the internet, will think ‘I better do that, or something terrible will happen.’,” he said.
“That’s when the trouble starts, so fear is a common ingredient but wasn’t in my case.”
Another Healesville resident, who asked for their name not to be used, went through a similar scam experience last December.
An email was sent to Star Mail’s editor email inbox on 23 December.
“I apologise for bothering you. Can I communicate with you by email for a little period of time?” it reads.
“I have terrible throat pain, so I can’t even make calls.”
The Healesville resident said the email was sent to everyone in her email address list including a person from Western Australia.
“They all replied in some way. Several people warned me straight away to get my password changed,” they said.
“There was another group of people who were worried about me, saying ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that you are ill, I hope you’ll be all right.’, but nobody fell into that trap; (The scammer asked them to buy a gift card and send it to them).
“The other group turned out to be very sensitive and believing the scam, sending me texts like ‘We’re always here to help you.’.”
This scam victim had been scammed before this, through which they lost $5000.
The Healesville resident said it was due to their ignorance of the scam.
“When this call came in, they said they were from Telstra and they’d noticed a fault in my email,” they said.
“It went on and on for about half an hour and I was blasted with requests. I was a little bit suspicious, but not enough to hang up.
“The man (the scammer) failed a bit, and a woman jumped in and pressured me to comply with what they were asking.
“I started to provide my details, and when I finally supplied the last bit of information, I could hear their relief and see $5000 went out from my bank account.”
IDCARE is Australia and New Zealand’s national identity and cyber support service, which is a not-for-profit charity that was formed to address a critical support gap for individuals confronting identity and cyber security concerns.
IDCARE national manager outreach and engagement Kathy Sundstrom said emails contain a treasure trove of information from personal contacts, to emails containing valuable information and more.
“Criminals target email accounts because of this, and it is why it is so important people protect their email accounts with multi-factor or two-factor authentication,” she said.
“Microsoft has estimated that having multi-factor authentication enabled on an account like an email stops over 99 per cent of account compromise attempts, yet so many people don’t have it enabled on their personal emails and social media accounts.
“It is easy to set up. We have fact sheets on how to do this in our learning centre on our website at idcare.org”
Ms Sundstrom shared the best ways for scam victims to take when they notice the scam.
“Your first step is also to ensure your financial accounts are secure and contact your bank,” she said.
“With access to your email, a criminal may have enough information to impersonate you so it’s important you don’t ignore it.
“You can also use your email provider’s recovery service and change your password and then set up two-factor authentication. Check your other accounts for indicators of compromise too, particularly your social media accounts.”
The recently passed Scams Prevention Framework Bill aims to enhance protections across the economy by setting out consistent and enforceable obligations for businesses in key sectors where scammers operate.
This new legislation empowers the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to investigate potential breaches and take enforcement action where entities do not take reasonable steps to fulfil their obligations under these principles.
ACCC deputy chair Catriona Lowe said the financial crime type, scams, present an unacceptable threat to the Australian community and have had a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of Australians.
“This bill is a critical step in the fight against scams – creating overarching principles that all members of designated sectors must comply with,” she said.
“We know scammers will exploit weak links in the system – so these principles are key to a consistent approach.”
Businesses that do not meet their obligations under the Framework can face fines of up to $50 million.
Banks, certain digital platforms, including social media, and telecommunications providers will be the first sectors required to comply with the legislation.
