The Australian Securities and Investments Commission remains concerned at level of organised crime involvement in scams designed to rip money out of the hands of vulnerable people.
ASIC senior executive leader Warren Day told Banking Day that the speed at which individuals and groups involved in this level of cybercrime operate means it can be difficult to trace funds once they have disappeared.
He says the transactional criminals are capable of switching off a particular scam quickly if they discover law enforcement bodies across the globe have discovered it and notified their respective marketplaces of the existence of a fraudulent web site or scheme.
Scamming outfits can use their previous templates and various documents to set up another scam online in the hope that their fresh punt at stealing people’s money garners a few victims along the way.
“The minute we identify those scams and publish them on our web site and the MoneySmart web site, they disappear. They’ll pack up. These guys operate out of a couple of laptops and a couple of bags and they’re gone,” Day says.
“They’ll go and enjoy the money that they have taken and most likely sit on the beach for a month. Then they’ll just change the names, dates and places on all of their documentation and their fake web sites and those types of things and they will start up again.”
Victims may not even have the chance to get the money back if the scammers have moved rapidly to shift the funds from the initial account the victim puts the money into. And then into another account and another …. until it may be beyond the reach of a regulator like ASIC.
One of the challenges for law enforcement is that the technological environment that exists today means a transnational scamming operation can be based anywhere.
Day says it is challenging to track down the originators of scams that cause people enormous grief because the location of the victims and the perpetrators will often be very different.
“There have been a number of circumstances where they have identified people running these types of scams operating out of South-East Asia but none of them are residents or citizens of those countries from which they are operating. They are probably European.” Day says.
“They rent a place for cash set up a lot of phone lines and they are away. When one of these gets identified and the local police are able to do something they are seen more as immigration offences rather than, quite frankly, the theft and real crime that they are in the jurisdiction where the victims are.”
Day has seen these scams come and go. He observes that the Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity for scammers to ply their dark arts because people are in a great deal of financial distress, worried about their futures and with time on their hands because they are at isolated at home looking at the internet.
“You’ve got low interest rate returns. You’ve got people who are worried about their retirement saving and superannuation balances. You’ve got people who are isolated because of lockdown orders or stay at home orders in States and Territories,” Day notes.
“What we are seeing is all sorts of cold calling scams where people are being contacted by e-mail or by telephone and basically being told that there are opportunities in these other jurisdictions where the stock market is supposedly hot and those types of things.”
There are variations on themes coming through in the way scammers are operating.
One of those highlighted by Day is the romance scam, where somebody pretends to have the hots for a victim while only wanting to hoover funds from their bank accounts. He says that is turning into a way of convincing people they should get involved in investing in crypto currencies or get involved in specific trading platforms.
“That contact detail of yours starts to do a round robin through a whole range of scammers hands and you are suddenly receiving all sorts of e-mails, all sorts of offers and – depending on how much detail you’ve given – all sorts of contacts through the telephone and otherwise,” Day explains.
“It is also time when people need to be a bit careful about what they do with their own information and their own data and who they give them to.”