Older Australians lost about $5 million to scams on social media platforms in the months leading up to Christmas last year, an increase of more than 50 per cent from the previous three months.
The findings in the latest National Anti-Scam Centre quarterly report prompted Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones to rebuke social media giant Meta for doing too little to crack down on scammers on its site, with the new data indicating older Australians were increasingly falling victim to Facebook swindlers.
Jones singled out Facebook’s parent company, Meta, as “the biggest part of the biggest problem”, saying figures showed it was failing to take meaningful action to stop the criminal activity occurring on its platforms.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones has slammed Meta’s efforts to tackle scams on its platforms as “not good enough”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Other avenues are having the noose tightened, while the social media platforms are not having their systems improved. That’s where the scammers are going. It is pretty clear in the data,” Jones said.
“For them [Meta] to be saying, ‘Oh, it’s all too hard. We can’t do anything.’ Frankly, it is not good enough.”
Jones’ criticism of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, comes a week after he accused the company of “an abrogation of responsibility” after it announced it would no longer strike compensation deals with media companies for news content on Facebook.
Separately, Meta has stoked the government’s ire by pushing back on a proposal for mandatory industry scam codes, which would impose minimum obligations on digital platforms, banks and telecommunications providers to reduce the risk of scams or face tough penalties.
In a submission last month to the government’s consultation on the proposed scheme, Meta said the obligation “to prevent further losses to a consumer who has been affected by a scam may be impossible for digital platforms to achieve” due to the way in which scammers “rapidly evolve their tactics in attempts to evade detection and enable persistence”.
But Jones dismissed this claim, saying Meta was not a “plucky little start-up” and had the resources and technological expertise to do more to stop the proliferation of scammers on its platforms.
“These guys have the best technology in the world,” Jones said. “They have the best technologists in the world. They are at the leading edge of every IT development. And they’re saying they can’t do any better than what they’re doing at the moment. Give me a break.”
Australians reported $477 million in losses to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch site in 2023, with phone scams the largest source of losses, accounting for $116 million, followed by social media scams at $93.5 million.
But these figures only represent losses reported by victims to Scamwatch, with actual losses believed to be much higher. The ACCC, which also runs the National Anti-Scam Centre, estimates Australians lost $3.1 billion in scams in 2022 – a figure that collates data from a range of sources including the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange and government agencies.
ACCC figures show the totality of reported losses to Scamwatch plummeted in the second half of 2023 after rampantly increasing in the first half of the year.
Reported losses due to phone, text message, mobile app and internet scams all declined across the 12-month period, while losses from social media scams rose more than 16 per cent throughout 2023, from $80 million to $93.5 million.
The quarterly report, to be made public by Jones on Tuesday, points to a downward trend across the board, with losses down 43 per cent for all scams in the December 2023 quarter, compared with the same quarter of 2022. Losses due to online scams also declined 25 per cent in the period.
However, the data indicates that over 65-year-olds are increasingly falling victim to social media scams, with losses among this cohort up 57 per cent on the previous quarter, with Meta’s platforms accounting for 81 per cent of all social media scam reports made by that cohort.
Typical scams on Facebook involve Marketplace scams, fake investment scams, and impersonation scams. Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has launched criminal proceedings against Facebook over cryptocurrency scam ads using his image, claiming Meta breached Australian anti-money laundering laws by failing to stop the publication of scam advertisements.
When approached for comment about its anti-scam measures, a spokesperson for Meta pointed to a recent blog post by its regional policy director Mia Garlick on the proposed mandatory scam code, which said the company was already investing significant resources in tackling the issue, and noted the “solution can’t be done by one company or one sector in isolation”.
Garlick said the company would support an “industry-led code” and argued “the majority of scams in Australia occur via text message (33 per cent), phone (29 per cent) or email (22 per cent), compared with 6 per cent via the internet and 6 per cent via social network and online forums”.