ANZ warns of payment scams after Australians lost nearly $100m in 2023

By Andrei Skvarsky.

Australia’s ANZ bank issued a warning last week about so-called payment redirection scams, a form of fraud that has cost Australians tens of millions of dollars lost to computer hackers who rerouted the money via fake bills.

In 2023 Australians had AU$91.6m (equivalent to the amount in U.S. dollars that year) stolen from them via redirection scams, ANZ cited the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) as saying in a report entitled Targeting scams and released on April 28.

But it is not too difficult to stay safe against this kind of fraud, according to the Melbourne-based bank.

One should check details of a suspicious emailed bill with the company that has purportedly sent it, ANZ suggested.

The bank also described typical telltale signs of redirection scams.

A fake bill may come through a messaging service such as WhatsApp that is not normally used for communications of this kind, contain language faults such as grammatical or spelling errors or be marked by a general tone not normal in business correspondence.

Typically, cybercriminals will not know the email signatures of companies and as a result use incorrect signatures or no signatures at all.

The domain name on an emailed fake bill may be another giveaway – criminals often use a domain different from but very similar to that of the supposed sender.

Small and medium-sized businesses are the most common targets of redirection scams as their computer systems are usually less sophisticated and easier to hack into, ANZ said.

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