Australian Commonwealth Bank claims it has cut customer scam losses for FY24 in half

Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, also known as CommBank, recently announced that it was able to cut customer scam losses in half for the Financial Year 2024 (FY24). The bank said that it achieved this by using a combination of new anti-scam technologies, customer education, and cross-industry collaborations.

How do CommBank’s anti-fraud measures work?

Banks around the world have been dealing with a sharp rise in customer losses caused by scammers and fraudsters, but in Australia, the Commonwealth Bank managed to find a solution that has proven to be highly effective.

The bank started by introducing advanced anti-scam tech that includes a Confirmation of Payee system called NameCheck, an impersonation scam blocker known as CallerCheck, and an in-branch verification tool CustomerCheck.

Furthermore, CommBank was also the first bank to integrate into the country’s new anti-scam intelligence loop. This allowed it to make it faster and easier to report and remove scams across banks, telcos, and even big tech.

The bank recently submitted over 1,500 entries involving scam phone numbers, as well as a number of URLs that should be blocked and taken down.

CommBanks records great success, but it is not enough

Commenting on the bank’s progress and results, CommBank’s general manager of group fraud, James Roberts, said that the scam losses were halved compared to the previous financial years. He added that CommBank’s NameCheck technology stopped scam payments worth more than an estimated $40 million.

NameCheck also prevented over $370 million in mistaken payments in the year leading up to June 2024. “Whilst this is encouraging, we acknowledge that Australians continue to lose money to scams and banks will continue to do more, and importantly telecommunications and social media platforms need to step up, to further suppress consumer losses, ” Roberts said.

The situation right now is considerably better than in 2023, when the highest reported scam losses were conducted via phone calls, emails, and social media. Commenting further on the matter, Roberts said that the large majority of scams tend to originate outside of the regulated banking systems.

Scammers would use phone calls, fake investment ads on social media, text messages, and even emails with malicious or fraudulent links. There are plenty of ways for them to make contact in places where the banks have no control, which is why fighting against scams requires the entire ecosystem to collaborate.

“This requires a whole-of-ecosystem response from big tech, telcos, and banks, focused on the source of scams,” Roberts stressed.