Kintyre Living hosts cybercrime awareness
Kintyre Living embraces all kinds of information and services to support residents lead happy, healthy and safe lives including being protected from cybercrime and scams.
In the latest of a series of interesting speakers and organisations to visit, former ABC radio journalist Rob Blackmore ran a Cyber Resilience Outreach Clinics (CROC) in the Kintyre Living Country Club recently, to share with information about IDCARE, Australia’s only dedicated support service for victims of scams and cybercrimes. While Rob’s audience were mostly retirees, they do not represent the most scammed demographic. “People think because older folks are unaware of technology and haven’t grown up with all the devices we’ve got, they’re being scammed the most. That’s a common misconception. In Dubbo our highest proportion in our demographic analysis was 35- to 40-year-olds. Over 65s were just 10 per cent. We see that a fair bit,” Rob said. Regardless of age in Dubbo, he also said many people don’t know how they were scammed in the first place. “It wasn’t the fact they clicked a link or answered the phone call, it could have been from a data breach from years ago where their account details were held by a company that lost them or had a hack on their own and those account details were used to open current accounts. That’s becoming more of a concern for us because it’s hard to stop future scams.” IDCARE already has about 150 clients in the Dubbo postcode needing help with compromised data, but he believes only 15 per cent of problems are typically reported.
“At Kintyre as for everywhere we host a clinic, we always start with a show of hands from who’s been scammed or had one of ‘those’ phone calls or texts, and it’s always everyone.” Rob says the statistics are alarming. In the first half of 2021, reports of cybercrimes, scams and identity theft impacting the Australian community increased 54 per cent and associated losses have increased 74 per cent when compared to the first six months of 2020 (Scamwatch, 2021). Australians have reported losing $2.5 billion to scams between 2009 and 2019. Telstra is now blocking around 13.5 million telephone scam calls A MONTH coming into Australia which is the fourth most targeted country in the world by scammers (behind the US, UK and Canada).
For more information visit: www.idcare.org