The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, in partnership with Nine Entertainment, has launched a new podcast series, Anatomy of a Scam, hosted by journalist Deborah Knight.
On its first episode, the new podcast series opened with the alarming fact that Australians lost more than $2 billion to scammers in 2021, a figure which was expected to double this year.
The eight-part series will see Knight exposing how scammers target people, and interview cybersecurity and law enforcement experts about how to recognise and prevent scams, as well as real scam victims, who will share their stories to warn others.
“Education is the key,” Knight said. “Understanding how scams work is the best way to recognise them and avoid them. We have to learn to protect ourselves.”
Matt Craft, detective superintendent who runs the New South Wales Police Cybercrime Squad, featured in the first episode of Anatomy of Scam to share insights about scams in Australia.
“We cannot arrest our way out of scams — education is key,” Craft said. “Scams impact all Australians – the old, the young, the rich, the poor.”
Also appeari in the episode was Katherine Manstead, director of Cyber Intelligence at CyberCX, who busted the myth that “all hackers wear hoodies.”
“It’s amazing the type of criminals that we come across in this business,” Manstead said. “It is big business; it is a global economy. And a lot of them aren’t your traditional hackers, their business isn’t hacking computers or hacking systems. It’s hacking you. They’re social engineers who try to play people to make money.”
The episode also tackled what can make us vulnerable to scams with Troy Hunt, a regional vice president at Microsoft and founder of data breach aggregator Have I Been Pwned?.
“We are subject to all of these emotions that scammers take advantage of,” Hunt said. “We’re subject to fear, to curiosity, to urgency. All these things are exploited by attackers.”
