CANBERRA - 19 October 2021

Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to talk about the current scourge of unwanted text messages and emails.

Many legitimate businesses use texts and emails to communicate with their customers, and my comments are not directed towards them.

However, spam as well as malicious texts and emails have been a worldwide problem for some time. 

They seem to have escalated sharply during COVID-19, especially in Australia.

The ACCC says that scams delivered via phone or text this year far outnumber those sent through any other delivery method, including social media or email.

Reports suggest that SMS scams have doubled, to cost Australians approximately $6 million over the past 12 months.

Delivery and postal scams are particularly common, along with other types of fraud such as premium-rate text fraud, tax demands, fake contact-tracing messages and smishing (SMS phishing).

There have also been recent reports of a Flubot Scam duping Australians desperate to stop the SMS tsunami, with 13,000 complaints to the ACCCs Scamwatch in August-September.

This rose to 16,000 in the last month.

What can be done?

Apart from educating customers, Australian Telcos such as Telstra state they are implementing programs such as “Cleaner Pipes”, to combat SMS scams.

Darren Pauli, Telstra’s senior cyber security analyst says, and I quote:

“Cleaner Pipes is how we’re further reducing instances of customer data being compromised through malware, ransomware and phishing.

“Cleaner Pipes means we’re reducing the impact of cyber threats on millions of Telstra’s customers, including stopping the theft of personal data, financial losses, fraudulent activity and users’ devices being infected with malware.

“While it can’t completely eliminate the risk, or substitute appropriate threat protection, it’s contributing significantly, and we’re blocking more than 13 million suspected and suspicious scam calls a month, on average, from reaching our customers.”

However, despite this program, the flood of SMS scams is ever increasing.

It’s well past time to act, and the Australian Government must stand up and fix the problem by whatever strong measures are necessary.

This includes negotiation and legislation where needed to ensure that Telcos substantially invest in fixing the problem, as well as having the necessary legislative support to do so.

Thank you.

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ENDS