Australian businesses were scammed out of $227 million in “payment redirection” cons – which includes business email compromise or BEC – over the course of 2021.
Payment redirection, as the ACCC groups these scams, caused the highest losses to businesses out of any scam type, according to commission’s latest scam report.
Combined losses reached $227 million in 2021, compared to $128 million lost to business email compromise reported from the prior year.
Because it doesn’t have a specific reporting category for payment redirection scams, the ACCC obtained its figure from reports of false billing, phishing, identity theft and hacking.
The commission also noted that most reports of payment redirection or BEC aren’t made to Scamwatch, but instead to banks or to ReportCyber, an online cybercrime reporting tool made by the government.
Scamwatch itself only received 3624 scam reports from businesses, with $13.4 million reported lost – “a 13 percent decrease in reports and a 27 percent decrease in losses” year-on-year.
“Businesses reported losses of $6.7 million to false billing scams with a median loss of $4200,” it said of the Scamwatch-only numbers.
“However, for small businesses, the median loss was $8000.”
The commission has a much broader, aggregate dataset it can draw upon for its annual scam report, outside of just Scamwatch.
This includes data from “ReportCyber, major banks and money remitters, and other government agencies,” it said. In…
