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Fresh warning over re-emerging scam: ‘Fix urgently’

Scammers are impersonating financial institutions to gain remote access to Aussies’ devices.

Eliza Bavin
·Personal Finance Editor
Updated ·2-min read
An image of two police officers walking on the street and a copy of the NSW Police warning about remote access scams overlaid.
An image of two police officers walking on the street and a copy of the NSW Police warning about remote access scams overlaid.

NSW Police has issued an urgent warning to Aussies about the re-emergence of remote-access scams.

The criminals pretend to be from various financial institutions or trusted companies and request remote access to a person’s phone or computer.

“They often use the excuse that the device is sending out an error message or has a virus that they need to ‘fix urgently’,” NSW Police said.

“Various software applications or programs are used by scammers to access the device. Once the scammers have control, they can access the financial and personal data and use this to transfer funds out of the person’s account or steal private data.

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“Never give an unsolicited caller remote access to your computer or device. Never give your personal, credit card or online bank account details over the phone to people you don’t know and can’t identify.”

Scam crackdown

In 2022, Aussies lost a staggering $21.7 million to remote-access scams and, so far in 2023, $2.4 million has already been lost.

Text messages were the most popular form of attack for scammers, with Aussies reporting more than 79,000 scam text messages in 2022. Aussies lost more than $28.5 million to text message scams last year.

Aussie telcos have blocked more than 90 million scam texts since mid-2022, when new anti-SMS scam rules came into effect.

Aussies are also losing more to scams in general. In 2020, Scamwatch data found there were around 216,000 scam reports made and more than $175 million lost. But, last year, that number increased to around 239,000 and losses more than tripled - to more than $568 million.

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