We take a deep dive and provide an analysis on the data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on “Payment Fraud”..

The latest report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics(ABS) provides statistics about personal fraud, including card fraud, identity theft, and scams. The data was collected from a survey conducted between July 2021 and June 2022, covering the 2021-22 financial year.

The report details that card fraud increased from 6.9% in 2020-21 to 8.1% in 2021-22, affecting 1.7 million people. They’re definition of fraud encompasses credit, debit, or EFTPOS card details to make purchases or withdraw cash without the account owner’s permission.

The ABS data shows that exposure to fraud increased from 55% in 2020-21 to 65% in 2021-22. We can extrapolate that more people received unsolicited invitations, requests, notifications or offers that could be fraudulent. The good news of that is that scam victimisation rate decreased from 3.6% in 2020-21 to 2.7% in 2021-22, indicating that fewer people actually lost money or personal information as a result of a scam. The ABS provides some examples of different types of scams, such as phishing, romance, computer support, and financial advice.

The other plus side is that identity theft decreased from 1.0% in 2020-21 to 0.8% in 2021-22, affecting 159,600 people. This may change this year due to the large scale data breaches at Medibank and Latitude Finance. The ABS also detail that identity theft victimisation was higher for women (0.9%) than men (0.7%), and for people living in capital cities (0.9%) than those living in rest of state areas (0.6%).

A new type of fraud emerging

This year the ABS introduces a new concept of online impersonation, which was experienced by 2.5% of people (509,500) in 2021-22. Online impersonation involves someone pretending to be another person online without their consent or knowledge, for example by creating a fake social media profile or sending messages on their behalf. The post also shows that online impersonation victimisation was higher for younger people (4.4% for those aged 18-24 years) than older people (0.5% for those aged 65 years and over), and for those who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (5.8%) than those who identified as heterosexual (2.3%).

Security company RSA to Fairfax has released a report that shines a light on the most popular suburbs in Australia for E-commerce fraud to occur.

E-commerce fraud requires a credit or debit card to be stolen and employed in order to purchase goods or services over the internet. The fraud in these Australian suburbs is thought to be the work of thieves who have gained direct access to the sensitive financial details of credit and debit card users or who have intercepted such information via remote online access. The data which reveals the extent of the fraud was culled from nearly 2 million credit and debit accounts throughout the country.

Of all the states, Queensland was rated as having the most frequent E-commerce fraud between the months of January and March. Victoria was placed second with New South Wales and Western Australia coming in at third and fourth, respectively. The data compiled from these states came from credit and debit card holders of both Visa and MasterCard accounts.

Within New South Wales, Fairfield represented nearly 7 per cent of that state’s fraudulent card activity. Gosford took a hefty share of the fraud with 5.4 per cent, while Hurstville came in third with 2.1 per cent and North Ryde following closely behind at 2 per cent. The suburbs of Hay, Sydney and Mascot rounded out the percentages with 1.5, 1.1 and 1 per cent respectively.

In Victoria, the ironically-named suburb of Sunshine raked in 3.1 per cent of the e-commerce theft in that state, while Melbourne accounted for 1.1 per cent. The suburbs of Sunbury, Burwood East, and Burwood all revealed fraud activity of less than 1 per cent each.

Sandgate had 2.6 per cent of the state of Queensland’s e-commerce fraud. Second was Brisbane at 1.6 per cent, with the Sunshine Coast at 0.8 per cent, and Ipswich at 0.6 per cent.

Source: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/personal-fraud/latest-release