With over half of the hard-earned money Australian small businesses lose to scams going to fraudulent investments, CBA Executive GM Rebecca Warren provides tips on how to identify a potentially fake investment opportunity.
Approximately 90% all scams reported by CommBank’s business customers in FY24 came from small business, with over half of their losses going to investment scams. This according to data shared by CommBank.
The data, which examines the number and types of scams reported by CommBank small businesses in the last financial year reportedly shows investment scams, phishing, and business email compromise continue to be the “most prevalent” scams targeting Aussie small business.
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Research has now unveiled the typical everyday habits making small businesses a major target for cyber crime Investment scams offer fake money-making opportunities, usually with the promise of “unrealistically” high or well above-market returns and “seemingly” coming from legitimate sources.
As noted in a blog post, business owners and professionals may be at greater risk of being targeted for investment scams since they’re more likely to have a considerable amount disposable funds to invest.
CommBank Executive General Manager Small Business Banking Rebecca Warren said, while it is great to see CBA customer scam loss declining overall, small businesses are still a vulnerble target and the effects of these abusive activities might be dire.
Warren said that they can see through their data that small businesses typically lose around $30,000 on average to investment scams, which can have a major negative impact, both financially as well as on an emotional level.
When they make an investment into what they think is a term deposit with a great interest rate, they tend to put in most of the funds they have, in order to considerable boost their returns.
Ms Warren clarified that their focus is on early detection and prevention of scams through fraud prevention and monitoring activity, features and education.
CommBank’s NameCheck feature prompts clients if the account details on a first-time payment don’t appear to be accurate based on available payment details.
CallerCheck enables clients to verify if a particular caller claiming to be from CommBank is actually legitimate, by initiating a security message via the CommBank app.
CommBank might use CustomerCheck in order identify their customers in branch or over the phone by sending a message to the CommBank app.
CBA claims that it has invested over $800 million in order to help protect customers against fraud, scams, financial and cybercrime.
Ms Warren also pointed out that scams are least effective when consumers actually stop and check, and then reject.
As explained in the update, we should all be suspicious of investment opportunities “that sound too good to be true, because they probably are.”
