Social media giants must do more to protect Australians from scams

The stories are as sad as they are common: a text message from a government agency asking to change a password, a phone call from the bank about a new account, an advertisement promising an investment opportunity.

What follows is often highly embarrassing and distressing, not to mention financially ruinous.

The good news is that data from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch service suggests Australians are getting better at spotting financial scams, and losing less cash to them.

The reported amount of money lost to scams in 2023 was $480.7 million, a 5.5 per cent decrease on 2022’s $569 million.

This year, reported losses between January and September totalled about $200 million – almost half the financial loss reported during the same period last year.

But cybersecurity experts have warned that our ability to identify scams may be compromised by more sophisticated techniques, including the use of AI and deepfakes to deceive viewers into believing they are dealing with a reputable company, being sold products endorsed by high-profile individuals, or – perhaps most terrifyingly – communicating with someone they know.

Social media was the initial contact method for just 6.4 per cent of the 198,126 scams reported to Scamwatch in the first nine months of this year, yet it was responsible for more than 23 per cent of the losses.

It is now the second most lucrative contact mode for scammers, after phone calls.

As Aisha Dow reported in the Herald this weekend, social media giant Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has taken tens of thousands of dollars from probable criminals to publish at least 174 ads touting Quantum AI investment schemes – a known financial scam.

Many Quantum AI ads use images and fake videos of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, one of several high-profile Australians used by sophisticated online scammers over the past decade.

Meta has also run ads paid for by scammers disguised as major banks. In one instance, a Queensland GP was scammed out of $150,000 from a Facebook ad purporting to offer a term deposit with ING.

Speaking about the Herald’s investigation, Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones accused Meta of showing “arrogant disregard for the harm that they’re doing here in Australia and elsewhere”.

Social media companies must do more to remove financial scams from users’ feeds. That they have been taking advertising dollars from scammers is of grave concern.

But it is remiss not to mention that Meta and other social media companies are the entities the federal government expects will enforce its planned social media age restrictions.

Details of the plan to restrict accounts to users aged 16 and over are yet to be determined, but digital rights activists have already raised concerns about the sensitive data needed for age verification.

The federal government believes the responsibility for keeping children away from apps such as TikTok and Snapchat should not fall to parents but to social media companies.

After their “arrogant disregard” for financial scams, can they be trusted?

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