ABA CEO Simon Birmingham transcript of interview on 2SM with Tim Webster on the buying and selling of bank accounts

E&OE
Radio Interview
2SM Sydney
21 July 2026.

Topics: Buying and selling of bank accounts; Efforts to combat money laundering

Tim Webster: Look, we spoke to Peter Price from Crime Stoppers, the boss at Crime Stoppers, about this banking mules. I mean, this ridiculous situation where the young ones are coerced into being, you know, money mules and being paid as little as 200 bucks. It’s extraordinary. To steal, or what they’re doing, the bank mule is laundering money. That’s exactly what they’re doing, and then you know it’s just an extraordinary situation. Well, Simon Birmingham is the CEO of the Australian Banking Association, so keen to flesh this out a bit further. He’s on the line. G’day, Simon.

Simon Birmingham: G’day, Tim. It’s good to be with you.

Tim Webster: Yeah, you too. It’s a worrying thing, this, and you think you know kids could be ruining their lives for the sake of 200 bucks. I mean, it’s just awful.

Simon Birmingham: It sure is. In Australia, we’ve got tight laws to make sure that money laundering, the siphoning of cash around our economy, isn’t easy for people. And they’re laws that mean that people like you and me and your listeners, who are law-abiding citizens, have a bit of hassle from time to time. We’ve got to verify our identity with our banks, and that’s all about banks upholding the laws and ensuring they know who owns a bank account, and it’s really important. So how then do crime syndicates, money launderers get around that? Will they try and convince people to access legitimate bank accounts and then use those accounts illegally? And that’s what’s called money mules, and this activity ridiculously is openly advertised and promoted on social media platforms, and those tech giants really need to do so much more, expected to do so much more to clamp down on this type of stuff that is sucking vulnerable people, young people, into selling their bank accounts, thinking there’s nothing wrong with it, when in fact there’s a great deal wrong with it, and they’re potentially getting into bed with some very bad crims.

Tim Webster: Yeah, they are indeed. I mentioned yesterday that my bank is pretty good. If they see something on our accounts they don’t like, they’re almost instantly on a text and telling me, and I go straight to the app and have a look. They’re pretty good. So, I mean, how can banks protect our details, protect the money? I mean, what’s the protocol for? Do they all have the same protocol? Does it vary from bank to bank?

Simon Birmingham: There are certain technologies that banks have been sharing between themselves. Confirmation of Payee is one of those built by one of the big banks, but then shared across the network to make sure that everybody has access to some of those protections. In terms of these mules accounts, Australian banks shut down around 10,000 of these dodgy accounts every year.

Tim Webster: Wow!

Simon Birmingham: And they do that by a range of things. The systems can flag unusual activity and the sharing of intelligence between themselves, and also with law enforcement agencies, the banks set up an organization known as the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange and run that in partnership with some other parts of the financial sector, and that’s an important intelligence gathering and sharing body alongside AUTRAC, the Australian government’s anti-money laundering agency, and so all of that works alongside new technologies, biometric checks, and identity checks that that are run and done, but of course, that is also why the money launderers are always looking for a new person, a new bank account, because that account has never been triggered before. That person’s name may never have been triggered before, and what people really need to know is that you might just think it’s harmless letting somebody access your bank account and getting a few hundred bucks in return, but these are crime syndicates, these are money launderers. You may well be helping to scam a vulnerable Australian out of their life savings by making your bank account available for criminals to funnel it through and get it into a place where they can then get it into that account, and then they’ll look to get it out of the country as quickly as possible. And once that happens, no getting it back to that vulnerable Australian.

Tim Webster: No and get yourself in serious trouble with the law as well. Just so people understand what we’re talking about here, as far as laundering money is concerned, that the crooks use the casinos, they use the poker machines, and I’m imagining they’re not. Well, they’re pretty. I’m about to say they’re pretty smart. They are, and they’re pretty devious. They wouldn’t be dealing in large sums of money, would they? Just smaller sums of money, but lots of them. Yeah,

Simon Birmingham: Often it is lots of smaller transactions, particularly transactions below the $10,000 type threshold that that have lower scrutiny in terms of reportability and so on applied to them, but equally sometimes they’ll be looking to move if they can one larger transaction quickly and just get that through as quickly as possible. It all depends on the scam activity and the illegal activity they’re engaged in.

Tim Webster: Yeah, look the Telegraph. Says the mules receive money, they’ve named a few banks. I’m loath to do that because I’m not the Telegraph. But I mean, in your experience, is one bank more vulnerable than any of the others?

Simon Birmingham: Look, no. As the attitude that that we’ve had from some of the big banks in sharing technologies with some of the smaller banks has been really important. Obviously, there is a capacity constraint there for smaller financial institutions, but they take their responsibilities really seriously to make sure they uphold the laws around identity checks and so forth, and to then to seize and use these technologies. And often, they also pull through third-party service providers that can give them then the scale of having the same type of technological protections that some of the big banks have too.

Tim Webster: Yeah, the advice for any young people thinking about doing it is absolutely don’t, don’t?

Simon Birmingham: 110 per cent. Nothing good will come out of selling your bank account, and you may well find yourself entangled in a whole weave of legal minefield and potential criminal activity that could ruin the rest of your life.

Tim Webster: World of pain. Thanks for the time, mate. Good to talk to you. Thanks.

Simon Birmingham: Thanks to you.

Tim Webster: Simon Birmingham, Australian Banking Association.

Ends