Bank highlights effectiveness of scam prevention initiatives
Payment alerts from the National Australia Bank (NAB) have led customers to abandon more than $100 million in payments since the initiative’s introduction to digital banking 15 months ago.
The alerts target invoice, investment, romance, and goods and services scams in the NAB app and internet banking. Customers receive an alert if a payment appears out of character or raises scam concerns, encouraging them to stop and check.
These insights coincide with NAB’s launch of its latest “Red Flags” campaign, using social media, online channels, and billboards to highlight the moment a customer reconsiders a payment after receiving an alert.
Chris Sheehan (pictured above), NAB executive group investigations, emphasised the importance of recognising scam red flags.
“Scams are a global epidemic,” he said. “We have to make Australia a harder place for these criminals to be successful. Stopping the crime before it happens is the only way we can stop scammers targeting Australians.
“Customer scam reports increased by around 10% between October 2023 and March 2024 compared to the same period a year beforehand, while customer losses decreased by around 17%.”
In the past two years, NAB has introduced several initiatives to thwart scammers.
“Since we announced last July we were removing links from SMSes, we’ve sent more than 40 million text messages to customers without links,” Sheehan said. “That’s 40 million moments in 12 months where we’ve been able to make banking safer for our customers by making it easier to distinguish if a text message from NAB is legitimate.
“Since we launched the payment alerts in March last year, customers have abandoned more than $100 million in payments after they received the prompt. That tells us customers are taking a moment to stop and check their payment.”
NAB also introduced blocking to some high-risk cryptocurrency merchants a year ago, contributing to a 74% decrease in scam losses linked to crypto from October to December 2023 compared to the same period the previous year.
Sheehan, a former Australian Federal Police executive, highlighted the positive impact of these initiatives combined with increasing public awareness.
“Working closely with government, the banking industry and other sectors, we’re focused on delivering improvements that help detect and prevent scams,” he said.
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