Scams, and keeping your money safe

Australians lose hundreds of millions of dollars to scams every year, and young people are caught more often than they expect. Not because they are careless, but because modern scams are engineered by professionals who understand exactly how people think under pressure.

The scams most likely to reach you

• Fake delivery and toll texts: a message says a parcel is held or a toll is unpaid, with a link to pay a small fee. The link leads to a fake payment page that captures your card.
• Impersonation calls and texts: someone claims to be your bank, the tax office or a parent on a new number, and asks you to move money or share a code.
• Fake investment ads: a slick site or influencer promises guaranteed high returns, often in crypto. Money in, then the site vanishes.
• Job and marketplace scams: a too good job that needs an upfront payment, or a buyer who overpays and asks for a refund of the difference.
• Voice clones: AI can now copy a family member's voice from seconds of audio and call you in distress asking for money.

It is tempting to assume scams mainly catch the elderly, and some do. But people your age are targeted heavily and fall for a different set of tricks: fake job offers, marketplace deals, gaming and crypto schemes, and messages that mimic the platforms you actually use every day. Being comfortable with technology is not the same as being safe on it, and scammers count on exactly that gap. The defence is not to trust technology less, but to keep the same simple checks no matter how familiar the screen looks.

The pattern under every scam

Strip the costumes away and nearly every scam runs the same engine: urgency plus authority plus an unusual payment path. Act now or something bad happens. I am someone you should obey or trust. Pay in a way that cannot be reversed, like an instant transfer, gift cards or crypto. Any one of those should raise an eyebrow. Two together is almost always a scam.

Of the three levers, urgency does the most work, so it is worth understanding why it is so effective even on careful people. Rushing shuts down the slow, checking part of your thinking and hands the decision to the fast, reacting part. A scammer who gives you time is a scammer who lets you notice the details that do not add up, so they never give you time. The countdown timer on a fake payment page is not there to process anything. It is there to stop you thinking. Once you learn to read urgency as a tell rather than a pressure, the whole trick starts to fail, because the very thing meant to push you becomes the thing that warns you.

The habits that beat them

• Slow down. Urgency is manufactured precisely because rushed people skip checking.
• Verify through a channel you control: call the real number from the bank's website or the family member's saved contact, never the number in the message.
• Never share one time codes with anyone, including anyone claiming to be the bank. Banks never ask.
• Treat guaranteed returns as a synonym for scam.
• If money has gone, act fast: contact your bank immediately, then report it at scamwatch.gov.au. Speed genuinely improves the chance of recovery, and there is no shame in it. These are professionals.

Acting fast works partly because of how payments settle, which the digital money lesson explains. A card payment often takes a day or two to complete, which leaves a short window where the bank can sometimes stop or claw it back, and card networks have dispute processes built for exactly this. An instant transfer you sent yourself is far harder to recover, because the money has already moved and the receiving account may be emptied within minutes. Either way the first call is to your bank, because they are the only ones who can freeze a card, reverse what is reversible or flag the account on the other end, and every minute genuinely counts.