Tamara Hunter and Gauri Prabhakar delve into the importance of Scam Awareness Week, highlighting how staying alert and remembering to ‘Stop. Check. Protect’ can help safeguard against increasingly sophisticated scams. We also recap the Scams Prevention Framework.
This week is Scam Awareness Week!
Scam Awareness Week is a collaborative effort between government, business, community groups, consumer protection groups, educational organisations and individuals to promote awareness around scams.
This year, the National Anti-Scam Centre (NASC) aims to reinforce three simple actions that can help protect Australians: ‘Stop. Check. Protect’ before clicking, sharing or paying.
Background
NASC was established on 1 July 2023 as a response to the growing number of scams and a reported absence of cross-sector engagement to prevent them from happening. NASC sits as a virtual centre within the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). NASC collects and shares scam reports so people understand how scammers work, in addition to providing advice on how to protect people against scams, what to do if they have been scammed and helping others affected by scams.
NASC is guided by an advisory board with representatives drawn from the finance, digital platforms and telecommunications sectors, as well as consumer advocates, victim support services and others with relevant expertise. NASC coordinates efforts between these groups to combat scams.
Data about scam reports and losses are reported to NASC’s Scamwatch service (www.scamwatch.gov.au), the cybercrime reporting platform, ReportCyber (www.cyber.gov.au) and the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (www.afcx.com.au).
Scam Awareness Week
In the first half of 2025, Australians reported more than 108,000 scams and financial losses of about $175 million to Scamwatch. Fake websites, online advertisements and contact through social media channels appear to be criminals’ preferred methods of reaching people. While reports about scams are down—for example, the 108,000 reports received by Scamwatch represent a 24% decrease compared to the same time last year—losses appear to have increased significantly: the $175 million lost to scammers represents a 26% increase compared to the first half of 2024.
This seems to align with a growing trend of spending more time and money online. For this year’s Scam Awareness Week—a national initiative led by NASC—NASC’s advice is to therefore ‘Stop. Check. Protect’ in the event you come across a potential scam.
Scams Prevention Framework
Scam Awareness Week is one of the many initiatives to prevent and deal with the rise in scams. Another relatively new initiative is the Scams Prevention Framework (SPF), which sets out consistent and enforceable obligations for businesses in the key sectors where scammers operate—namely, banking, telecommunications services and digital platforms.
We wrote about the SPF when it was first introduced here.
The SPF protects individuals and small businesses in Australia, as well as Australian residents overseas using regulated services provided by regulated entities based in Australia (like Australian banking apps).
Under the SPF, businesses in the banking, telco and digital platform sectors must take reasonable steps to prevent, detect and disrupt scams (amongst other obligations—see further below). Reasonable steps mean businesses need to actively consider what is practical, appropriate and proportionate, recognising that a one-size-fits-all solution may not always work. For example, if a bank has many customers who don’t speak English as a first language, a reasonable step may mean that bank must take extra steps to ensure scam warnings will be understood by them.
Key principles and obligations of the SPF include:
- Principle 1—Governance: Businesses must develop and implement governance policies, procedures, metrics and targets to combat scams.
- Principle 2—Prevent: Businesses must take reasonable steps to stop scam activity from reaching or impacting consumers.
- Principle 3—Detect: Businesses must take reasonable steps to detect scams which includes investigating scams and identifying consumers that are, or could be, impacted by scams in a timely way.
- Principle 4—Report: Businesses must report and share information indicating possible detected scam activity with the ACCC and if requested, scam reports received by the business to either the ACCC or the sector regulator.
- Principle 5—Disrupt: Businesses must take reasonable steps to disrupt scams suspected to be in progress to prevent losses or further losses to consumers.
- Principle 6—Respond: Businesses must provide accessible mechanisms for their consumers to report scams, and an accessible and transparent internal dispute resolution mechanism for consumers to complain about scams or the business’ conduct relating to scams.
The ACCC has primary oversight of monitoring the overarching obligations in the SPF (alongside sector-specific regulators).
The SPF sets out a tiered penalty regime with higher penalties applying to more significant breaches:
| Tier 1 contravention | Tier 2 contravention | |
| A tier 1 contravention is a breach of the obligations in the primary law relating to preventing, detecting, disrupting and responding to scams | A tier 2 contravention is a breach of the obligations in the primary law relating to reporting and governance and any breaches of the sector code | |
| Penalty for an entity | The greater of:
· 159,745 penalty units (currently ~$52 million); · Three times the value of the benefit obtained; or · 30% of the turnover during the period in breach |
The greater of:
· 31,950 penalty units (currently ~$10.5 million); · Three times the value of the benefit obtained; or · 10% of the turnover during the period in breach |
| Penalty for an individual | 7,990 penalty units (currently ~$2.6 million) | 1,600 penalty units (currently ~$520,000) |
Key take-aways:
Both Scam Awareness Week and the SPF represent the Australian Government’s increased investment in the detection and prevention of scams. The decrease in the number of scams reported since NASC’s establishment also demonstrates how effective a coordinated approach across various stakeholders can be.
However, as scams become increasingly sophisticated, regulators, businesses and consumers must all work together to build a truly scam-aware community. As the ACCC notes, scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated and scammers are continually finding novel tactics to target vulnerable consumers.
By remaining vigilant and acting quickly when something feels wrong, everyone can play a part in disrupting scam networks and protecting themselves from financial harm.