Achi news desk-
Westpac has introduced an AI-based questionnaire to combat the hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned off Australians through scams each year.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows the number of people who have fallen victim to a scam has fallen slightly in the past three years, to around 2.5 per cent of the population – around 514,000 people.
Westpac said its team of more than 500 financial crime experts had stopped scammers from taking $400 million in the past two years.
On Tuesday a new lining was added to the bank’s shield, with the launch of a questionnaire feature for online banking and in-app transactions.
Tips to help avoid online scams
“This innovation is the first of its kind in Australia and will add important friction to payments considered to have a high scam risk,” Westpac chief executive Peter King said.
Payments deemed suspicious will be flagged, and questions generated by AI such as ‘is this an investment’ or ‘is this money going to a friend?’ will pop up.
Westpac analyzes the reply, and requests necessary follow-ups to compare the transaction against common scams.
The bank’s chief executive said that although preventative measures had led to a “significant reduction” in customer losses in the past year, fraudsters were still taking millions of dollars from customers every month.
The banks do not publish total scam and fraud losses themselves, instead passing figures to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
The ACCC reports that Australians lost $567m to scams in 2022, and $476m the following year.
ABS data shows that 35-44 year olds fell victim to the most scams last year, with 3.5 per cent of people in that age group falling victim. However, people over the age of 65 lost the most money together to scams.
Buy or sell scams are most common, followed by requests for information and advance payments.
Card fraud is actually much more common than scams, according to ABS data.
About 1.8m people were victims of card fraud last year – 8.7 per cent of Australians over the age of 15.
The type of scams that circulate are always changing. In January the alarm was raised about a scam taking a three-second audio recording of a person’s voice; AI then impersonates that person and scammers target friends and family.
This month Westpac is reporting emails pretending to be from the bank containing a link to a phishing website that will take your personal information.
“Never use a link received in an email or SMS to log into your banking,” says the latest scam warning.
