How Australians were scammed $851 million in 2020

In 2020, Australians lost over $800 million to scams as the scammers capitalised on the COVID-19 pandemic to target the isolated people. Phone calls and texts were the most common ways with which fraudsters contacted the vulnerable people, as 48% of reported scams took place over phone calls and 15% over text messaging.

According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Australians lost $851 million due to scams in 2020. Sometimes, it is hard to identify a scam phone call, and as a result, we get in direct contact with the scammers. There is third-party software that identifies and blocks suspicious calls. But experts have warned that the software is not completely transparent, reported The Guardian.

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In the early days, scammers used an automated voice to warn you that you owed money to the tax office or to any other government body. But scammers today use various other techniques. 

Deputy chair of the ACCC Deilia Rickard said that scammers took advantage of the fact that many Australians expected direct correspondence from government agencies. And that led to a “huge increase in phishing and identity theft and government impersonation scams”.

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Scammers also used a technique called ‘Wangiri’, which means ‘one ring and drop’ in Japanese. A foreign number dialled and cut the call after one ring, to make people think that they had a missed call. If they called back, they were put on hold and charged a fee for every minute, reported The Guardian.

“For periods, people were under lockdown and stressed. People were online who weren’t used to being online. People were lonely and experiencing financial difficulty. These were all circumstances that scammers like” said Rickard.