ABA CEO Simon Birmingham interview on FiveAA Adelaide with Graeme Goodings

E&OE
Radio Interview
FiveAA Adelaide with Graeme Goodings
14 November 2025.

Topics: Black Fridays shopping Scams; Meta and scams ads; Bank account access

Graeme Goodings (Host): We’ve got to be aware of scammers every single day, and they’re getting cleverer and smarter all the time, and people continue to fall for their traps. We need to be ever vigilant. With Black Friday approaching, that’s a perfect time, it’s like bees to honey for scammers. So, we need to be even more careful than normal. The Australian Banking Association has putting out a warning key threats that we need to look out for the ABA CEO Simon Birmingham joins us now. Simon, good morning.

Simon Birmingham (Guest) Good morning. Graham, good to be with you.

Graeme Goodings: And with you, now as I said, scamming is with us you know, 365 days of the year. We need to be particularly aware, though, around sales time when people are sort of almost in a feeding frenzy. What? What do we need to look out for?

Simon Birmingham: Well, indeed, Graeme, the enthusiasm that Australians have for getting a bargain is totally understandable, and we all share in that. But in that desperation, sometimes for a bargain, there is a real need just to step back and take a little bit of care. Shoppers are estimated to spend around $7 billion in Australia during Black Friday sales. It’s an incredible surge in shopping activity. But just as shoppers are ready to pounce, so too are scammers, and estimates are that on shopping scams, Australians lose around $40 million a year.

Overall, we’ve seen some success in driving scams down, but as people undertake more online shopping, the scammers are getting more sophisticated at mirroring the websites to make them look like real retail websites, and so taking care to ensure that the URL, the internet address of your website, is that of a legitimate business, is that of the business that you think you are buying from. Checking through legitimate search engines, to make sure, again, that you’re on the right link checking the payment details that you’re given to ensure that it does appear to line up legitimately with who you think you’re buying from. These are all little steps that might only take a few extra minutes or seconds even, but they can really help to keep people safe against ever more sophisticated scams.

Graeme Goodings: So what you’re saying is this just a warning from the Banking Association, or is there a bigger role that banks can play?

Simon Birmingham: Banks are certainly playing a big role, and in that sense, a lot of money is spent by banks to enhance payment technologies to give people, you’d see, most Australians now if they’re transferring money on their phone apps would see the Confirmation of Payee technology that enables you to not just enter the name of who you think you’re paying money to, but to actually then have the bank check it to ensure that it does match up with who you’re paying that money to. Those sorts of technologies are really important behind the scenes. Banks are doing a lot in terms of using AI themselves to fight back against scammers, so being able to better, faster, more quickly, detect the types of words, tools, otherwise in the crypto sphere and elsewhere, that might suggest a transaction is related to a scam, and with that then using that technology to pause those transactions, to stop them, to have time, to have conversations with customers, and to stop that from happening.

But the best way to stop scams is well and truly at the source, and that’s where urging individual Australians to take that little bit of extra care themselves with their money, with their purchases, is critical, not just on the websites that I talked about before, but also, of course, still being careful of text messages and emails. I think people do take more care in that space nowadays, but when you’re expecting a delivery and you get one of those text messages saying that there’s a delay in your delivery, and you need to click through check those links before you click through and absolutely take caution. Go back to your original source if anybody’s asking for credit card or other payment details in in addition to what you’ve already paid.

Graeme Goodings: Now, do you have any thoughts on scamming on social media? Meta has projected 10 per cent of its revenue for the past year would come from ads deliberately by scammers and about banned goods

Simon Birmingham: I mean, this is actually quite startling, maybe not surprising sadly. I think many people have doubts around the way social media works and the lack of ethics in some of that engagement, but really quite startling, 10 per cent of a global giant like Meta’s known and expected revenue coming from scam ads, and those ads are targeting people at vulnerable times, in different circumstances, to rip them off, to take their money away from them. And this is shocking.

One of the very good things that was done in the last Australian Parliament and done by the Government with bipartisan support was to put in place for Australia a Scam Prevention Framework, and we’re eager to see the development of codes in that framework so that we can get on with not just banks doing our part, and we absolutely have a responsibility and a part to play, but also telecommunications companies and the social media companies being expected to do their part. Australia’s framework legislation is world leading, as Australia is leading in banning social media access for young people, in trying to tackle media rights. So too, it’s really critical that we lead in relation to making social media companies play their part in taking down these scam ads, because if they can budget for them, if they know where they’re coming from, then they should be stopping them to protect people from losses in the first place.

Graeme Goodings:  I think, speaking of awareness too, if somebody is scammed, I know that the natural reaction of a lot of people is, I’m so embarrassed. I got scammed. I got caught out. It’s cost me money. I’m not going to tell anyone. But I think if someone is scammed, and they can say, this is how it was scammed, it was on social media. It was on this platform, whatever, this is what to look out for. I think if people speak up, you know, we’ll all benefit.

Simon Birmingham: Absolutely Graeme, at all levels, please, please, please to listeners, if you are scammed, alert your bank. That isn’t a guarantee that your bank can get your money back for you. I don’t want to create false promises. There are successes, but it’s not a guarantee each and every time. But I can guarantee that the more people report scams to banks, then the better banks will be at preventing other people from getting scammed. That the more information they have around the accounts that have been used, where money is actually going in those scams, the easier it is for those systems to then shut it down when those scammers are acting in future. But yes, absolutely, raising awareness on social media in other ways, also just helps to warn people.

The very reason we’ve put this press release out, we’re having this interview is because we as banks don’t want to see our customers get ripped off in terms of money going off to criminals overseas and elsewhere around the world through these scams. That creates problems in terms of customers who are being ripped off, who have less money available to them, and who look to their banks to try to solve these problems for them. And the best way for all Australians to address these problems is to so far as they can prevent them at the source and to take that extra care in the first instance.

Graeme Goodings: Now you’ve talked about heightened bank security and that, and that is a good thing, but we keep getting calls to this radio station, Simon, from people who are just trying to do simple transactions. We had a woman only yesterday who said she wanted to pay in some cash for her daughter into her account. She had all the details and the card, I think it was, and because she personally didn’t have an account with that bank, she couldn’t make the transaction. Does that make sense to you?

Simon Birmingham: Look, not, not completely. Graham, it doesn’t. Most of our accounts will have transaction caps on them. So it may be, if you’re trying to transfer a large sum of money between family members that you hit up against that cap. And I know that can be annoying.

Graeme Goodings: Iget the impression on this, this was not a lot of money at all. It was money raised for a charity. We’re talking small amounts here, and she just wanted to pay it in her account.

Simon Birmingham: Well, that example itself doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Would be more than happy if you wanted to, if the caller wanted to get in touch to see if we could get to the bottom of it, because we all nowadays make you know, right across the country, many millions of individual to individual transfers, and they happen seamlessly, quickly, right throughout the economy. But there are these different approaches put in place to provide warnings, real time detection and scam blocking tools that are there where an account raises a red flag in a bank system to slow that down and I cited crypto payments as being a big area of scams where people are encouraged to make their payments into crypto, and so a lot of those areas do raise red flags in banking systems and that’s done to try to slow down the losses. I understand the frustration it causes when people are doing something legitimate, and that sometimes that does mean having to call your bank and work through those issues with them. But on the whole, this is about trying to stem losses and banks trying to do the part that governments and consumer advocates and others expect banks to play in relation to protecting individuals.

Graeme Goodings: Simon Birmingham, good for chatting. Good to chat with you today. Thanks for your time. It’s the ABA CEO Simon Birmingham.

Ends