Radio Interview
Interview on ABC Radio Riverland
26 August 2026
Topics: Small and medium business scams; Tips to avoid scams
Matt Stephens: This is a stat for you: four in five small and medium businesses say they’ve had a scam attempt on their business in the past 12 months. Four in five. The Australian Banking Association has commissioned the research as part of Scams Awareness Week, and there’s been a lot of talk about scams, and rightly so and you need to be aware. This is another reminder that scammers don’t just target individuals, but they go for businesses as well. With so many small businesses in the region, you really need to keep your wits about you, because in this economy, losing a lot of money may not be a situation that you can recover from, particularly in business. Simon Birmingham is the Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Banking Association. Simon, good morning.
Simon Birmingham: Good morning, Matt. Good to be with you.
Matt Stephens: 90 per cent of businesses have had a scam attempt. Is that a concerning number to you?
Simon Birmingham: Well, it is concerning, but it is the reality we face in this day and age, where scammers are, sadly, all-pervasive, using all technological means available to them and often coming from quite sophisticated global crime syndicates that actually run scam factories and centres out of foreign countries and project scams into countries like Australia. Obviously, as you said in your intro, we usually think of scams in the context of keeping individuals safe, and that’s a really important message during Scams Awareness Week: that we should all, when we’re conducting transactions, just stop and check so as to be able to protect ourselves. But small businesses are particularly vulnerable. Their information tends to be out there in a more public way. Of course, they’re advertising online and promoting themselves, and that means that they are often targets for the type of scam activity these global syndicates pursue.
Matt Stephens: Do we know how much scams cost businesses?
Simon Birmingham: The cost of scams to businesses can absolutely run well into the millions, depending upon different circumstances. What we know, though, is also that many businesses are helped along the way. While we’ve seen four in five report that they are the subject of some scam activity and that they have seen that activity, one in three also say that their bank has flagged suspicious transactions with them in the last year, and one in five recognise that banks have actually blocked transactions that were of risk. So, a lot of effort goes in to try to stop and stem losses. They’re best stopped at the source to stop scams themselves and for people to protect themselves, because banks cannot always detect a transaction and certainly cannot always get the money back. But where they can, they’re certainly doing a lot more of it.
Matt Stephens: I want to come back to that in a second. Simon Birmingham is Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Banking Association. So, is the effect just lost money when there’s a scam, or is there more to it that affects a business?
Simon Birmingham: For businesses, it can cause reputational damage as well. Often, the ways that businesses are victims of scams is through fake invoicing-type scams. Now, sometimes a business will be a financial victim because they are paying the fake invoice, thinking they are paying another supplier to their business when, in fact, it is an impersonation of that business. Other times, the business themselves is the subject of being impersonated, either through luring customers or others into making payments into something they think is your business. Again, a fake invoice being a simple example where it is doctored up using artificial intelligence, increasingly easy to look like an invoice from a legitimate business and come from an email that seems like it’s the legitimate business. That’s where one of the really important protections that banks have deployed recently is Confirmation of Payee. Where over the last year, pretty much all Australian banks have deployed this technology, that people would see when they go to transfer money between bank accounts. There’s now a step where it checks that the name of the account matches the account number you’ve given and the name that you’ve given. That matching process has occurred more than 150 million times over the last year in transactions around Australia.
If you get the red flag, and indeed, I got one the other day paying a tradie for some work at home, I stopped and got in touch with the tradie and said, “Mate, the name that’s on your invoice doesn’t match what’s coming through in terms of the account check. Have I really got the right account number here?” You’ve just got to sometimes do that stop and be able to protect yourself.
It’s also a message to small businesses that many will use trading names that might differ from their company name or what their bank account is. Make sure your invoices reflect what the payment details to your bank actually are, because that will ensure your customers can have confidence when they’re making a payment that it is going into the right bank account.
Matt Stephens: Simon Birmingham is the Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Banking Association. Yeah, it’s great to see that banks are working on this and doing work to make it safer for people to transfer money online, but it’s one of those things where you need to be a step ahead of the scammers. Is there work being done to try and future-proof in some way? I mean, I know you can’t prepare for what you don’t know, but can you get where I’m going here? We need to be a step ahead of the scammers.
Simon Birmingham: Absolutely, Matt. While I referenced the use by scammers of artificial intelligence, certainly banks are also using all of the technology at their disposal, spending ultimately, billions of dollars in terms of upgrading technology and capabilities to try to protect consumers. Those technology tools are ever evolving, but also sometimes just the practical ones. One of the complaints that I often get in this job is when people find the bank has slowed them down. They’ve gone to withdraw a large cash sum from a bank, and there’s been a whole series of questions they’ve had to answer on the way through. That is because the bank is trying to check that it’s not a scam. It’s your money; you’re entitled to withdraw it and spend it as you choose. But those steps, in terms of asking questions when something seems to be a suspicious transaction, are actually about trying to protect you.
Indeed, we know that scammers will also coach people in how to answer some of those questions: “Oh well, you should tell the bank that it’s for a new car, and these are the answers you should give if they’re asking.” If somebody is coaching you on how to answer questions to your bank about withdrawing money, that is a big red flag. You should probably not be giving money to that person or transferring it to that person, because it is highly likely that it is a scam. Your bank has no interest in stopping you from getting your money if you want it, but they do have an interest in trying to protect you, because once money is lost, people will often turn around and ask the bank to get it back, and sadly, they can’t always do that. Sometimes they can, but if it disappears off into cryptocurrency, it’s gone.
Matt Stephens: Yeah. Simon Birmingham, appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.
Simon Birmingham
Thanks, Matt. My pleasure.
