#nicholas mcelroy

It almost always begins with: "Hi Mum". Police say they continue with something along the lines of "I've changed provider/lost/broken my phone – I'm temporarily using this number for now." Once the scammer receives a response from a concerned parent, they continue to pretend to be their child and eventually request money using the emergency as their reason for needing the funds. The most common tactic is claiming to have lost or broken their phone as a justification for a funds transfer, because they can't access their online banking, says the ACCC. The ACCC says scammers may also ask for personal information, which may then be used to scam other family members. Victims usually then transfer funds to bank accounts provided by the scammers, which are often set up fraudulently.

Scammers are using the same technology that legitimate companies use to send messages to potential customers en masse, Dr Lacey says. Except he says their strategy seems to be completely random. "We've seen it across board, where they've been impacted by a data breach or not — it's almost like a random number generator for mobiles," he says. "The crooks have got a server and they've plugged in a data-range, and they've just gone bang (and send out messages)." Casting such a wide net means scammers only need success from a tiny portion of messages to steal millions. "The sheer weight of text messages means you're going to get the one per cent of people unfortunately who are literally in the wrong place at the wrong time," he says. While the approach might seem random, the victims fall into a similar category. Over two-thirds of family impersonation scams have been reported by women over 55 years of age, the ACCC says. In total, 82 per cent of victims are in this age bracket and account for 95 per cent of all reported losses.

For many the scam might seem fairly straightforward. If it looks like your child is in trouble, you help them without a second thought. That's because scammers have zeroed in on the mental shortcuts we make every day, Dr Lacey says. In psychology it's called heuristics: the mental steps we take to simplify problems and avoid cognitive overload. "One of the vulnerabilities to us all is that as human beings, we cut corners when we're processing information," he says. "We will see things in our environment or hear things and then we'll go 'oh, that's that' and we won't wait for (any more information) and act."

Cases of the "Hi Mum" scam date back to January and have been widely reported. So far this year $7.2 million has been reported stolen from at least 11,100 victims, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) says. The number of victims impacted by the scam has increased tenfold from August, when the organisation reported that 1,150 Australians had fallen victim to the scam and total losses had reached $2.6 million. It is estimated that just 13 per cent of victims report being scammed, largely due to the embarrassment that can be felt as a result of being conned.