Costs Don't miss out on the headlines from Costs. Followed categories will be added to My News. In the UK, new laws commenced on Monday that require banks to repay their customers’ scams losses, except in limited circumstances.
Over there, laws to protect consumers from scams are not a controversial topic, having received bipartisan political support. In fact, the British banking sector has had a voluntary reimbursement system for years, paying back an average of 67 per cent of customers who have lost money to scams. As a result, losses to scams have gone down in the UK, and are at a fraction of what Australians are losing.
Right now, Australia is a honeypot – the target of scammers domestically and internationally — with more than $2.74 billion lost last year. That is far more compared to other countries such as the UK, no matter how you measure the losses.
Our scam response has been left to industry to lead, and it is bank customers, not businesses, who are paying for 96 per cent of scams losses, according to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. The absence of regulation and industry inaction has left Australians exposed as scammers become far more sophisticated, adopting Artificial Intelligence, stealing biometric information and preying on lax security systems in a fast-evolving digital financial system. CEO of the Consumer Action Law Centre Stephanie Tonkin is calling for the government to implement a better system for scam victims to get their mon.