Your Phone. Their Payday.

A single scam text can open the back door to your bank account — and you might never get your money back. In this episode of Daylight Robbery, we reveal how spoofed SMS messages from trusted senders like Australia Post or your bank are being used in sophisticated scams that banks fail to stop. Katrina clicked one fake Australia Post link. Her Chinese bank stopped the charge — but scammers still drained £33,000 Great British Pounds from an HSBC account opened in her name. HSBC is now under investigation by ASIC for failing to detect or act on 950 different Australian HSBC spoofing frauds. Katrina, however, has not been asked any questions nor had any reimbursement.Furkan, a Melbourne tradie, got scammed through messages inside his ANZ text thread. He was tricked into sending $58,000 to scam mule accounts held at ANZ. Despite a key AFCA ruling — the “Mr T decision” — the ombudsman conciliated just a $6300 reimbursement for his $58,000 loss. If the bank successfully recovered Furkan's money (which you would assume they could do, given it went through their own accounts) they are not obliged to tell Furkan how much they recovered or which accounts it was recovered from - it would simply 'turn up' in his bank account - no transparency, no accountability.

Key moments

0:04 – How one SMS can lead to disaster

1:21 – Katrina’s scam begins

2:47 – £33,000 stolen from her fake HSBC account

5:57 – Sunni Wan: another HSBC victim, $50k gone

6:23 – AFCA's “Mr T” ruling changes the game

8:36 – Furkan’s $58k ANZ loss

12:24 – ANZ fraud detection activates after the scam

16:45 – Breached data fuels the scam boom

18:32 – Why scam laws won’t protect you until 2026

19:30 – Corporate crime called out

Watch now and find out how scammers slip into your messages — and steal your future.

When a middle-aged mum gets riled, watch out. Here's why I made Daylight Robbery. I've chatted to more than 35 financial crime victims in Australia. Every story is different. Every story is complex and extremely difficult to make sense of. That's because the criminals are smarter than governments, banks, telcos and big tech companies. They push the boundaries, move faster and have a raft of cheap tech tools to do their dirty work. Our police can't keep up. And the victims carry the blame for the loss.

They call romance scams pig butchering - a brutal name which means ‘killing pig game’. Australia is experiencing real estate butchering: the slaughter of our property market through scams and fraud committed on Australian banking platforms. Our houses are the second most expensive in the world and overseas crime gangs know it's a cinch to steal home deposits and settlement funds, especially now the home-buying process has moved away from bank cheques to online banking through PEXA. Targeted spear phishing attacks are relatively simple given how much personal information is available on the dark and light web - Artificial Intelligence allows all breached data sets to be rinsed and mixed and matched by searching for key homebuyer terms like “contract” or “settlement date” and then homebuyers about to exchange funds are targeted with payment misdirection scams. Despite a fall in reported scams from $2.7 billion of losses in 2023 to $2 billion of losses in 2024, these types of email and payment redirections frauds rose by 66%last year - and why wouldn’t they? Banks don’t stop it, because they know they can blame the customer. The payment platforms are not accountable or transparent about how they recover the money and in some cases the banks charge interest on the losses to make even more profit from the crime. Police sometimes investigate, but it takes months of their resources to catch the mule, rather than the big crime boss overseas who receives the funds.

00:00 – Intro: What is Pig Butchering?

00:36 – Ken Gamble: The most profitable crime on earth

00:43 – Australia’s housing market ripe for scamming

02:51 – Louis' Story: $109K stolen in a fake PEXA scam

04:53 – How AI spear phishing targets home buyers

06:53 – Banks used to refund victims—now they profit

07:33 – Louis: “Banks have no incentive to stop scams”

08:24 – Strange coincidences: Louis’ backstory

10:09 – Levin’s Story: $91K stolen & silenced by gag order

13:54 – Sarah & Laine: Lost $252K buying a dream home

16:44 – ANZ’s failure: From help to blame

18:08 – Homeless risk: Living out of boxes after the scam

19:28 – Hope & Tom: $250K lost while 34 weeks pregnant

21:01 – Why banks don’t stop it: Pure profit

22:01 – AFCA and blame shifting

22:42 – Louis: “I faced a senior bank lawyer alone”

23:20 – ASIC, AFCA, laws that should protect—but don’t

25:00 – CommBank CEO: “Email is a grotesque waste of time”

25:32 – Louis: “Safe banking ads feel gut-wrenching”

26:12 – Next time: Fake AusPost texts and how they led to a HSBC payday

#RealEstateScam #HomeBuyerScam #PEXA #BankFraud #SpearPhishing #AFCA #FinancialCrime #DaylightRobbery #AustraliaHousingCrisis #MortgageScam #Commbank #ANZ #NAB #ScamAwareness #Cybercrime #MuleAccounts