Afterpay warns of spike in scam texts ‘across the financial services industry’

Australia’s most well-known buy now, pay later (BNPL) firm Afterpay has warned of an increase in scams across the financial service industries, with customers being targeted by unsolicited phishing texts and emails.

Afterpay sent an email to customers on Monday morning saying it was aware of a recent increase in fraudulent phishing text and email activity “across the financial services industry”.

Afterpay says there has been a recent increase in phishing scams.Credit: Attila Csaszar

“These are being undertaken by scammers attempting to gain unauthorised access to customer accounts,” the company said.

It advised customers never to share their password or verification code with anyone and be cautious when opening links in texts or emails, even if they appear to come from Afterpay. It also told consumers to look out for grammatical errors and typos in text messages and emails.

Phishing is a type of scam where fraudsters send messages pretending to be from trusted sources in order to collect personal information.

Rival BNPL lender Humm has also issued a warning about phishing scams on its website.

“We are aware of an SMS phishing campaign targeting our customers,” the company said.

“If you receive an SMS asking you to confirm your Humm account details by clicking a link, please treat it as suspicious.”

It advised customers not to verify account details via SMS, and recommended that they block any suspicious number and change their password.

Texts purporting to come from BNPL service LatitudePay are also being circulated, with the company saying on its website that a number of customers and non-customers were reporting unsolicited verification texts.

Latitude has assured customers their account security has not been compromised and that there has been no unauthorised access or activity on their accounts.

“If you received an unexpected text message from LatitudePay, you can ignore it and delete it from your device. Remember - don’t click on any links or respond with personal information if you receive an unexpected text message.”

They said their security team was monitoring the event.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s ScamWatch found that financial losses from SMS scams in the year to June increased by 188 per cent compared to the same period in 2021 - from around $2.3 million to over $6.5 million.

Phishing was the most frequently complained about, with Scamwatch receiving 71,308 reports, a 62 per cent increase on the number of these reports in 2020 (44,079 reports). Phishing scams resulted in at least $4 million in losses

The highest reported losses were via bank transfers, Bitcoin and “other payments”, which includes other cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin such as Ethereum, as well as Afterpay and other digital payment apps.

In April, Telstra introduced a new scam filter designed to keep users from being bombarded with dodgy SMS messages.

The telco said it had activated the new technology — which works at a network level to stop suspicious messages before they reach their destination — for all customers of Telstra mobile and virtual operators that use Telstra’s network.

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