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It’s legal for a merchant to get your card details over the phone – but it can still be risky. Here’s what you need to know to stay safe.
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One of the first ‘spam’ messages on record was sent in 1854.
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Losses have surged, and change is needed to better protect Australians into the future.
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A new proposal aims to prevent SMS scams by introducing a national SMS sender ID registry.
Cloning someone’s voice is easier than ever.
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Powerful AI tools available to anyone with an internet connection make it easy to impersonate someone’s voice, increasing the threat of phone scams.
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2021 saw particularly higher losses for vulnerable demographics. The numbers are startling – and the government arguably isn’t doing enough.
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It’s true that phones aren’t as prone to viruses as computers – but they’re still far from immune.
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Although it’s estimated illicit activity amounts to less than 1% of all cryptocurrency transactions, figures of losses are still staggering – and on the rise.
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As winter draws in, Australians don’t just have to prepare for tax time — they must also be on the watch for scams.
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Crude text scams, sent en masse, only have to work a handful of times to make criminals significant sums of cash.
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Last year, men were more likely to report losses to investment fraud, while women were the main target for romance fraud. Overall, men reported higher financial loss.
Scammers impersonating the Australian Taxation Office have fleeced Australians of more than $830,000.
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As curious social animals, humans are more trusting of people than we should be – especially when we’re dealing with people over the phone, email or via SMS, in the absence of body language.
Fraudsters use specific social engineering tactics to gain the trust of their victims.
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Australians have lost more than $76 million to fraud so far this year. These are the tactics that online offenders use to dupe their victims.
These scammers don’t exploit technological vulnerabilities – they exploit human ones.
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A number of factors – from our eagerness to place trust in people to our overconfidence in our own intelligence – make us easy prey.
Student data is a popular target for hackers and a hot product on the online black market.
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A new scam tricks families based overseas into paying a ransom for Chinese students in Australia who have supposedly been kidnapped.
Jamaica’s lotto scammers have gotten rich tricking American seniors and gamblers into thinking they’ve won the lotto, then demanding a modest ‘processing fee.’
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Lotto scamming — a criminal enterprise largely targeting elderly Americans — is lucrative in western Jamaica, where it is thought to be behind 50 percent of all area murders last year.