Travellers help foreign scams

Aussies being used to ‘wash’ funds

Australian backpackers are funding their travels by running scams from Thailand that steal a victim’s life savings, a cyber crime expert says.

Organised criminals, backed by Russian and Nigerian gangs, have been hiring Australians because they were more likely to be trusted.

And Australians answering too-good-to-be-true offers of making $1000 a week working from home were washing the proceeds of those scams through their bank accounts.

A former Australian Federal Police (AFP) officer, who now runs a private cyber security company, has lifted the lid on how Australians are being ripped off.

“There are Australians and others who travel, who get jobs when they’re in these countries (Thailand and the Philippines), and they become the old boiler room scam right now,” CyberCX chief strategy officer Alastair MacGibbon said.

“And there is a criminal infrastructure in Australia that is there. Successful bank frauds often still require money mules, people who are willing to move cash from one place to another.

“Now they are largely Australians, or people in Australia, who think they’ve got a job from someone saying I run a legitimate (business).”

Australians lost more than $3 billion to scams in 2022, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. However, those losses almost halved in 2023 after the National Anti-Scam Centre was set up last year.

Mr MacGibbon, who established Australia’s High Tech Crime Centre when he was with the AFP, said organised crime was increasingly focusing toward online fraud.

“Criminals tend to be agnostic to how they can make money. What they like is money and they don’t care who they harm to obtain that money,” he said.

“If there is a more lucrative way for criminals to make money, they will go down that path.”

Australian companies have also become targets of ransomware attacks in recent years, with hits on Medibank Private and Optus.

CyberCX was called in by St Vincent’s Health, which operates 13 hospitals and 23 aged care homes, when it was hacked on December 19 last year.

Mr MacGibbon was unable to comment on the St Vincent’s Health issue.

However, he said, speaking in general terms, that many of the scams originated in Russia.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones attended a Global Fraud Summit in London in March, which included politicians from Europe, the United States, South Korea and Singapore. Russia did not attend.

“Behind every dollar lost to scams is a heartbreaking story – we are working hard to intercept these malicious criminals before they can inflict pain on innocent Australians,” Mr Jones said.