Scams & Fraud.
In 2025, Australian businesses and individuals lost $2.18 billion to scams — up 7.8% on the prior year despite fewer reports overall.
Scams are becoming more targeted, more sophisticated and more damaging per incident. In some cases, there is a legal right to recover losses from a negligent third party. We can help you understand whether that applies to you.
ABOUT
The scale of the problem
In 2025, Australians lost $2.18 billion to scams — a 7.8% increase on the previous year, despite a fall in the total number of reports. The pattern is significant: scams are becoming fewer in number but higher in impact. Criminals are targeting more carefully, executing more convincingly and extracting more from each victim.
For businesses, the most relevant figures are stark. Payment redirection fraud and business email compromise — the scam types most likely to affect a commercial organisation — accounted for approximately $166.8 million in losses in 2025 alone. Investment scams accounted for a further $837.7 million. These are not consumer problems. They are business and governance problems, and regulators are increasingly treating them as such.
The one-line takeaway from the 2025 data, released by the ACCC's National Anti-Scam Centre in March 2026, is that Australia has moved from a high-volume scam problem to a high-impact, high-value scam problem. AI-enabled impersonation, voice cloning and sophisticated social engineering are accelerating both the realism and the success rate of attacks. The organisations most at risk are those whose internal processes have not kept pace with the threat.
LIABILITY
When someone else might be liable.
Where a scam or payment fraud has succeeded partly because of the negligence of a third party — a lawyer, a real estate agent, a financial adviser, a bank or another service provider — there may be grounds to pursue compensation or damages from that party.
Law & Cyber has successfully brought claims against legal practitioners and real estate agents where clients became victims of fraud as a result of professional negligence. Simone Herbert-Lowe is a recognised expert in professional liability in Australia and has given written expert opinion in Supreme Court proceedings involving payment fraud where the sums in dispute were in the tens of millions of dollars.
Simone's expertise in this area extends to published research. Her peer-reviewed paper presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society 2022 and published in IEEE Xplore examined exactly who should bear the loss in fraudulent banking transactions — and argued for name-matching verification of electronic transfers. Following publication, she was invited to give evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement into Cybercrime. In the period that followed, a key reform the paper had argued for was adopted — the banking sector's Scam-Safe Accord introducing Confirmation of Payee. That depth of engagement with the policy and legal landscape means our advice on scam-related claims is grounded in research, not just practice.
The question of whether a third party is liable is fact-specific and requires careful legal analysis. We assess each situation on its merits — honestly and without encouraging litigation where it is not warranted.
What we advise on.
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We assess whether a third party's negligence or breach of contract contributed to your loss, and whether the facts support a claim for compensation or damages.
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We advise on the specific legal framework that applies to payment redirection fraud — including the duties of financial institutions, the obligations of professional advisers and how courts have approached loss allocation in these cases.
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We advise on the legal dimensions of business email compromise — including liability for losses, insurance coverage and what steps your organisation should take immediately after discovering a compromise.
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Where a claim is viable, we advise on the most effective path to recovery — whether through negotiation, mediation, insurance or litigation — and represent clients in pursuing that outcome.
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We also work with organisations proactively — reviewing the internal processes and controls that make payment fraud more likely to succeed, and recommending the changes that reduce your exposure.
Reporting a scam.
If your organisation has been the victim of a scam, you can report it to the National Anti-Scam Centre via Scamwatch. Reporting does not affect your ability to pursue a private claim and assists the ACCC in tracking and disrupting scam activity nationally.
Think a third party's negligence contributed to your loss?
Contact us for a confidential discussion about your situation.