The effect of organised scam activity goes beyond consumer fraud; it is a matter of national security and prosperity.
Australia’s existing mix of intelligence-sharing, industry controls and financial crime regulation provides a strong base for a national defensive network against scams. But success will depend on faster and more systematic intelligence distribution across scam targets.
Over the next two years, Australia’s implementation of its Scam Prevention Framework will be crucial in strengthening our national network against this threat.
In January 2025, raids in Palau disrupted a scam compound operating from a hotel in Kokor, the island’s main city. It was run along the lines of similar compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia: foreign workers had been trafficked into the country, trapped in a scam centre and forced to target victims with online scams day in and day out.
Closer to Australia, an August police raid on a scam centre in the Timorese territory of Oecusse resulted in the arrests of dozens of foreign nationals. A 2025 UN report indicated that law enforcement pressure may be pushing Southeast Asian scam syndicates to infiltrate Timor-Leste and other Pacific jurisdictions.
Evidence from the Palau compound indicated that the scammers were running a cryptocurrency scam as well as an illegal online gambling platform targeting Chinese-speaking customers. Illegal online gambling sites are a known threat vector for scams and money laundering in Australia. Such sites are used to defraud gamblers, harvest account and identity information and launder the proceeds of scams.
There is no indication that the Palau or Oecusse syndicates targeted Australian consumers. However, these developments reinforce a point made by Paul Curwell and Nicholas McTaggart in a 2024 Strategist article: the scam threat is not just a matter of consumer fraud but of national security and transnational organised crime.
Australia is already tackling scams through industry and government initiatives. The National Anti-Scams Centre’s targeted taskforces, known as fusion cells, unite public and private sector participants to address specific scam problems. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch service harnesses reported intelligence to alert the community to new and emerging scams. Under the 2023 Scamsafe Accord, Australia’s retail banking sector committed to several scam prevention initiatives, including a confirmation-of-payee system and industry-wide intelligence-sharing. Most of these initiatives have now been implemented. The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre identified the laundering of scam proceeds as an increasing threat in its 2024 national money laundering risk assessment. Since then, its cryptocurrency taskforce has targeted high-risk crypto ATM providers, a known channel for the laundering of scam proceeds worldwide.
These initiatives draw on the varied strengths and expertise of Australia’s enforcement agencies, regulators and private sector organisations. Government data suggests that these and other measures have had measurable success, with scam losses having declined steadily since 2022.
This is encouraging but needs to be taken in context. The Palau and Oecusse cases show the evolving capabilities of scam syndicates: they adapt to international pressure by targeting new jurisdictions, interact at scale with consumers through convincing online interfaces, and launder scam proceeds through multiple channels. One present weakness is their dependence on unwilling human workers, but this may change as rapid advances in deepfake models, chatbots and agentic AI support automation of the scam lifecycle.
The Scam Prevention Framework creates obligations for designated sectors within the scams ecosystem to prevent, detect and disrupt scams. The telecommunications, banking and digital platform sectors have already been designated. Collaboration is key to preventing scams within that ecosystem. Intelligence needs to be distributed across the network as quickly as possible and deployed tactically (to disrupt scam activity), operationally (to uplift controls and improve processes) and strategically (to strengthen national and global scam prevention frameworks). While the business objectives and priorities of participants may differ, the network is best protected through a shared commitment to uplifting scam prevention.
Australia has several assets in its project to harden the national ecosystem against scam threats. The framework builds on a foundation of government and industry initiatives that are already having an effect on scam volumes. Australia’s law enforcement agencies and regulators are well-resourced and capable, with appropriate powers to obtain information for their investigations. These powers are supplemented by existing public-private intelligence partnerships to combat fraud and money laundering.
No network defences are perfect. Scams will continue to slip through, but the framework provides a basis for strengthening those defences over time. Scam losses erode Australia’s prosperity and financial security, so forcing scammers off our national network is a win for industry, the government and the consumer.