A regional Victorian woman who was scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars by a sales representative claiming to be from Amazon says Australian banks need to do more to protect customers.
Sharon Watkins, a healthcare worker from Woomelang in the state's north-west, finished a phone call with a person who said they worked for the online retailer, opened her bank account and found $30,000 missing.
"It was total disbelief," she said.
"Just panic — I didn't know what was happening.
"It was there, and then within seconds it was gone."
The person had called Ms Watkins under the guise of helping her cancel her subscription.
She became suspicious at the the end of the call when the scammer told her to stay offline.
After a frantic call, Ms Watkins's bank locked her account and reported the incident.
$53m lost in two months
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's ScamWatch data shows Australians have already lost nearly $53.5 million this year.
More than 27,500 reports have been made and 11 per cent of those involved financial losses.
Ms Watkins said her bank told her there was no guarantee she would get her money back.
She told ABC Victoria's Statewide Drive program that the bank's stance was that she was the one who gave the scammer access to her account.
But Ms Watkins argued that the scammer could only gain access because it was linked to her Amazon account.
Consumer Action Law Centre senior policy officer Tom Abourizk said that caveat needed to be addressed to improve the legal obligations of banks when unauthorised transactions occurred.
"What Sharon's described there, the banks refer to as authorised transactions, and we think that that's a real misnomer," he said.
"Because when someone's being scammed, they're under a great deal of undue influence.
"It's certainly not in any sense what we'd call a genuine authorisation of you providing the bank details to someone.
"So right now, there's a real big problem there."
Mr Abourizk wants it to be compulsory for banks to do security checks when large or unusual transactions take place.
"There's virtually no sort of legal standard in terms of what the banks need to do to prevent, to protect their customers from scams," he said.
Ms Watkins was able to get her money back, but her case is another example of a rising number of sophisticated scams catching Australians out.
"Something's got to change, because I've gone into internet banking very reluctantly — I don't like technology," she said.
"I think it's not safe and I'd prefer to go back to going into a bank."
'Hey mum' text costs $8k
Wodonga resident Nina Merillees was busy at work in July last year when she got a WhatsApp message from overseas from someone she took to be her daughter.
The message said: "Hey Mum, my phone is broken, this is the new number you can contact me on."
Ms Merillees replied to ask if she should delete the old number and proceeded to do so.
Later that night another text came through from the scammer saying they needed to pay an urgent bill, but could not because they had not set up the new phone.
After three money transfers and a phone call that was hung up on, Ms Merillees started to get suspicious.
"It wasn't till I thought, 'Gee, this is it just doesn't sound right' … that I sent my daughter another email and she rang me on her old number," she said.
"Then I realised that I'd been scammed.
"I worked in finance years and years ago, and you think you're a sensible cautious person and you just get caught unawares, and it can happen so easily."
Ms Merrilees's bank acted straight away and contacted the receiving bank to try and stop the transaction.
But her own efforts with the receiving bank proved unhelpful because Ms Merrillees was not its customer.
She transferred $11,000 in total, $3,000 of which was returned to her by her bank.
Scam losses have doubled every year since 2020 in Australia.
Last year, Australians lost more than $568m, according to Scamwatch.
