To get one step ahead of the scammers, banks in Australia are turning to innovative methods including monitoring how users tilt their devices in order to detect scammers.

National Australia Bank, one of the Big 4 banks in the country, is monitoring the angle at which customers hold their phones when conducting banking transactions, says chief executive officer Andrew Irvine.

Additionally, the lender has deliberately added more “friction” to payment processing as well as a suite of predictive protection measures, reported Bloomberg.

“We’ve added tooling that looks at biometrics and the way you actually interact with your devices and how you think about keystrokes,” Irvine told the Australian Banking Association Conference in Melbourne this week. “If these things are different to how you’ve used your phone in the past, our intelligence will kick in.”

According to the Australian Banking Association itself, there were 301,778 scams worth A$477 million reported to ACCC’s Scamwatch in the 12 months to December 2023 – an average of 25,148 scams a month, worth A$39.7 million each month.

What has necessitated banks to go the extra mile is that scammers are now leveraging AI technologies to carry out their activities, which is why banks such as the one that Irvine oversees are moving away from making payment transfers swift and effortless, to deliberately adding more steps to vet new transfers.

“These threat actors go where the money is. You want to be the best alarm system in the street and right now Australia’s leading the way,” Irvine said.

Calling the financial scammers the “scourge of our times”, Irvine added that Australia is one of the few countries where bank fraud losses are falling

In April, the ACCC noted that its latest Targeting Scams report revealed a 13.1 per cent decline in reported losses to A$2.74 billion in 2023.

The report was compiled with data reported to Scamwatch, ReportCyber, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange, IDCARE and ASIC.

It showed that Australians made over 601,000 scam reports to these organisations in 2023, an 18.5 per cent increase on 2022. In terms of financial losses, investment scams continued to cause the most harm (A$1.3 billion), followed by remote access scams (A$256 million) and romance scams (A$201.1 million).