Scam statistics Australia 2026

After two years of decline from the 2022 peak, reported losses turned up again in 2025. The National Anti-Scam Centre notes reports with a financial loss rose 11.2% year on year, even as total report numbers stayed roughly flat — fewer people reporting, more of them losing money.

Investment scams: $837.7 million lost in 2025, down 11.4% (ACCC)

Investment scams remain Australia's most damaging scam type by far — more than the next four categories combined — though losses fell from $945.0 million in 2024. Many victims lose retirement savings or superannuation.

Payment redirection (BEC): $166.8 million lost in 2025, up 9.3% (ACCC)

Business email compromise — intercepting genuine invoices and swapping the bank details — overtook romance scams to become the second-costliest category. How BEC scams work →

Romance scams: $139.9 million lost in 2025, down 10.8% (ACCC)

Romance scam losses eased but remain among the most personally devastating, and are widely under-reported due to stigma — the National Anti-Scam Centre says shame keeps many victims silent.

Phishing: $97.6 million lost in 2025, up 15.5% (ACCC)

Phishing was also the single most reported scam type — 65,361 Scamwatch reports — though only 2.3% of those reporters lost money. It's the front door to many other scams: a fake bank, toll or myGov message harvesting your details.

Remote access scams: $69.9 million lost in 2025, down 34.1% (ACCC)

The steepest fall in the top five — the report credits detection and disruption work by banks and telcos for cutting these “fake tech support” losses by a third.

Older Australians carry a disproportionate share of scam harm: the 65-and-over group reported the highest total losses ($88.8 million), the highest median loss ($716), and lodged the most reports (44,411). People aged 35–44 were the most likely to actually lose money, with 5,037 loss reports totalling $43.7 million. (Age figures are Scamwatch reports only — see methodology.)

Top 2 scam types by overall loss per age group, Scamwatch reports 2025. Source: Targeting Scams report 2025, Table 6.

The 2025 Targeting Scams report does not publish a state-by-state table, and we don't estimate numbers we can't verify. State and territory breakdowns (NSW, Victoria, Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmania, ACT and NT) are available in the National Anti-Scam Centre's official interactive dashboard, filterable by state, scam type, age and month: Scamwatch scam statistics dashboard. If a state table returns in a future report, this section will carry it.

The channel shift is stark: losses from online contact (websites, apps, social media) rose 21.8% while phone-call losses fell 32.0%. Text-message scam reports collapsed from 77,365 in 2024 to 29,058 — a 62.4% drop credited to network-level blocking — yet the dollars lost to text scams still rose to $17.9 million. Email was the most common contact method overall (84,861 reports), but only 5% of email reporters lost money.

For the first time, cryptocurrency and digital-currency-exchange payments ($121.3 million, 36.2% of Scamwatch losses across just 3,993 transactions) overtook bank transfers ($118.1 million) as the biggest loss channel — a significant shift of scam money out of the traditional banking system, where new protections have made recovery and disruption easier.

Reported losses undercount the true harm. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' Personal Fraud survey found 2.7% of Australians — 596,600 people — experienced a scam in the 2024–25 financial year, and only 71% of them notified (or were notified by) an authority. Stigma keeps some of the highest-loss categories, like romance scams, especially under-reported.

National totals on this page are combined figures from five reporting channels — Scamwatch, ReportCyber, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX), IDCARE and ASIC — as de-duplicated and published by the ACCC's National Anti-Scam Centre. Age, contact-method and payment-method breakdowns come from Scamwatch reports only, a subset covering 39.2% of all reports and 12.8% of all losses in 2025, so those sections describe patterns, not national totals. Every figure was transcribed from the sources below and is re-verified whenever this page is updated; nothing is estimated or interpolated.

• Targeting scams: report of the National Anti-Scam Centre on scams data and activity 2025 (ACCC/NASC) (retrieved 2026-07-08)
• ACCC media release: Continued action critical to combat fraud as annual scam losses exceed $2 billion (retrieved 2026-07-08)
• Scamwatch scam statistics (interactive dashboard, National Anti-Scam Centre) (retrieved 2026-07-08)
• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Personal Fraud 2024–25 (as cited in the Targeting Scams 2025 report, Appendix 2) (retrieved 2026-07-08)

Reuse: charts and data on this page may be republished with attribution and a link to this page (tryscamscanner.com/statistics). Please also credit the ACCC/National Anti-Scam Centre as the underlying source. Media enquiries: support@tryscamscanner.com.

Looking for live, first-party data instead? Our Australian Scam Trends dashboard reports what Scam Scanner users are checking right now — a different, complementary lens on the same problem: this page is the official national picture; /trends is the live street-level one. Or try the free scam checker tools.