The Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT) is a group of 22 government regulatory agencies and departments in Australia and New Zealand. It works with private sector, community and non-government partners to prevent fraud. The ACFT has run a range of fraud prevention and awareness-raising activities since 2005. One of its key initiatives is to run an annual consumer fraud survey to take a snapshot of the public’s exposure to consumer fraud and fraudulent invitations, to assess their impact, determine how victims respond, and identify emerging typologies and issues. The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), as a taskforce member and chair of its research subgroup, hosts the survey on behalf of the ACFT. It should be noted that the survey participants were not randomly sampled and so survey findings are not representative of the general population.
This report presents the results of the 2014 survey, which ran for six months from 1 January 2014. This period encompassed National Fraud Prevention week, which coincides with global fraud awareness-raising activities. The theme of the 2014 campaign was Know who you’re dealing with, and it was aimed at raising awareness about relationship scams by asking people to think twice before transferring money to people they did not know personally.
Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Executive summary
- Introduction
- Method
- The 2014 consumer fraud survey results
- Loss of personal information or passwords as a result of fraudulent invitations
- Conclusion and policy implications
- References
- Appendix 1