practical living
O
lder Australians seeking investment opportunities or
looking for love online must be vigilant to avoid falling
victim to scammers.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC)
recently released Targeting Scams Report found investment fraud
and dating and romance scams accounted for half of the money
reported lost by people over 55 last year.
ACCC deputy chair Delia Rickard says there are many other
scams that affect older members of the community but romance
and investment cons resulted in the largest financial losses.
Overall, the report found a $3 million increase in scam losses
reported to the ACCC on the previous year, as well as a 15 per cent
increase in complaints.
Rickard says the ACCC is encouraging older Australians in
particular to wise up and watch out for scams that target them.
The call is echoed by COTA Australia chief executive Ian Yates, who
says the body regularly hears heartbreaking stories of scams that have
targeted older Australians and unfortunately hit their mark.
Rickard sits down with Aged Care Insite to detail the most
common kinds of scams and how to avoid them.
ACI: The report found a $3 million increase in scam losses
divulged to the ACCC and a 15 per cent increase in complaints
on the previous year. How did older Australians fare in 2015?
DR: Older Australians didn’t fare that well, I’d have to say, in that
about 40 per cent of the losses reported last year were from people
who were 55 or older. The losses last year were quite considerable.
For the first time, we combined the losses reported to the ACCC
with those reported to the Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting
Network, plus losses detected through some of our disruption work
and several other agencies. We found that Australians lost at least
$229 million last year. It no surprise that we’re getting more scam
reports and seeing more lost, even though, on the upside, people
are getting wiser to scams, so that we’re seeing a reduction in the
number of people who fall for them – from 14 per cent in 2013 to
10 per cent this year, and older Australians, in particularly, are savvy
at not falling for them. We get a lot of reports from them in which
they’re telling us about scam activity but haven’t fallen for it.
What we are seeing is that technology makes scams almost
ubiquitous these days. [There’s email] and the new voice
technology that makes it very cheap to set up call centres
anywhere in the world. Plus there’s social media, where many
more scams are being perpetrated, particularly over Facebook.
All of this means you have to be on your guard all the time.
What are some of the main scams older Australians should look
out for?
We classify scams into two categories. There are high-volume,
small-gain scams – older Australians are particularly vulnerable to
those. Then we have the low-volume, high-value scams, which
focus on investment and romance. That’s where we see most of
the money lost. Older Australians lost $21 million [in the last year]
through these two [types of] fraud.
We’re seeing a lot of these high-volume scams at the moment.
[These are the kind in which] you get a telephone call out of the
blue and the person on the other end claims to be the tax office
and they say: ‘You owe us money, unless you pay within four or
five hours, the police will be knocking at your door.’ That’s not
how the [Australian Tax Office] does business, and if you get one
of those calls, hang up. If you’re in any doubt as to whether or not
you owe money to the tax office, don’t use any of the contact
details provided by the caller. Go and independently source them
22 agedcareinsite.com.au
Knowledge
thwarts
a scam
Here’s how some of the more common
fraudsters operate, and how to avoid falling
victim to any con online or over the phone.
Delia Rickard interviewed by Dallas Bastian