The numbers coming out of Australia tell a story that should worry every brand manager and security leader in the country.

Between January and April 2025, Australians lost AU$119 million to scams. It is a 28% jump from the same period last year.

What’s striking is not just the dollar figure. It’s where the money went and how attackers got it.

Phishing scams impersonating government agencies and financial institutions tripled year-over-year, jumping from AU$4.6 million to AU$13.7 million.

Meanwhile, social media-related scams accounted for AU$23.4 million, a 30% increase. These are not random data points. They are symptoms of a calculated shift in how criminals operate in Australia’s digital economy.

The Financial Services Targeting Problem

Australian banks have become prime targets for brand impersonation. In July 2024, bulk messaging company SMSGlobal was found guilty of sending SMS without adequate verification checks.

Scammers exploited it to send brand impersonation messages using headers from NAB, ANZ, and Australia Post.

Think about what that means in real-life scenario. Your customers receive a text message that looks legitimate and something that your bank likely sent.

The sender ID says “NAB” or “ANZ.” The message warns about suspicious account activity and provides a link. Most people won’t question it because everything looks legitimate. From branding to tone, and even the technical details like the sender name.

The financial sector reported the highest percentage of data breaches involving social engineering and impersonation in the first half of 2024.

What’s particularly concerning is how attackers are combining multiple vectors. A phishing email might be followed by a voice call from someone claiming to be from the bank’s fraud department. The caller already has some of your details—perhaps from a previous data breach—which makes the whole thing feel authentic.

Commonwealth Bank learned this lesson expensively. In October 2024, one of the largest banks down under paid AU$7.5 million penalty for sending more than 170 million marketing messages.

This act violated the spam laws. While this was not a scam itself, but scammers watched, learned, and replicated the patterns elsewhere. 

Retail’s Social Media Problem

For the first time in 2024, social media surpassed email as the primary channel for retail scams in Australia.

Let that sink in. The platform where people browse, shop, and connect with brands is now the most dangerous place for consumers making purchasing decisions.

Over 10,000 online shopping scams were reported in 2024, with losses exceeding AU$2.5 million.

But the distribution more importantly tells us where the vulnerabilities lie. Social media and online forums accounted for 26.8% of retail scam reports. They edged past email (23.8%) and general websites (22.9%) scams in doing so.

McAfee’s research identified the brands most frequently impersonated in Australia’s retail space.

Apple leads the consumer brands in terms of fake websites, fraudulent emails, and promotional alerts. In the luxury segment, Coach shows up in approximately 45% more scam-related websites than the next closest luxury brand. Nintendo, Samsung, Disney, and Steam round-up the most-targeted mainstream consumer brands.

The holiday shopping season is another time where we see a sharp spike in brand impersonations.

Scam-related web addresses increased by around 10% in the weeks leading up to major shopping events in 2024. Counterfeit websites mimicking luxury brands jumped 45%, particularly for handbags, footwear, and special releases.

Nearly one in five Australians lost money to holiday scams, with the average reported loss of AU$445.

That’s not catastrophic for most individuals, but it’s enough to hurt. More importantly, it’s enough to damage brand trust permanently.

The AI Acceleration Factor

Artificial intelligence hasn’t just made brand impersonation easier, it has made it scalable in ways that were not possible even two years ago.

Australia was the eighth most targeted country for phishing attempts in 2024, with over 30 million recorded attacks.

Zscaler’s analysis showed these were not broad spray-and-pray campaigns. Attackers used AI to design targeted campaigns aimed at specific business departments like the IT, HR, finance, and payroll.

The phishing lures became more realistic and convincing because AI helped craft messages that matched the tone, style, and specific language patterns of legitimate internal communications.

What’s particularly concerning is how AI lowers the barrier to entry for these attacks. You no longer need sophisticated technical skills to create convincing brand impersonations.

Phishing-as-a-Service platforms now use AI to generate fake websites, craft personalized messaging, and scale campaigns quickly to exploit emerging opportunities. Cyber threat intelligence platforms enable organizations to track these evolving tactics, monitor adversary infrastructure, and anticipate campaigns before they impact customers.

The Multi-Channel Attack Strategy

Australian regulators have documented a clear trend where attackers don’t rely on single channels anymore.

They blend email, SMS, social media, phone calls, and even in-person contact to create layered deception.

Australian telcos blocked more than 2.6 billion scam calls and 936.7 million scam SMS messages between December 2020 and March 2025.

Those are blocked attempts. The ones that got through still numbered in the millions. The persistence is remarkable. When one channel gets harder, attackers shift to another.

Investment scams, payment redirection schemes, and remote access scams—many relying on identity impersonation accounted for over 70% of total scam losses in Australia. Many of these schemes are coordinated through underground marketplaces and criminal forums. Dark web monitoring solutions help brands detect leaked credentials, impersonation kits, and scam infrastructure before campaigns scale.

The Regulatory Response

 Australia has been active when it comes to regulatory response and designing compliance frameworks.

In February 2025, Parliament passed the Scams Prevention Framework, establishing new obligations for businesses in telecommunications, digital platforms, and banking.

The framework creates six principles that regulated entities must follow, with enforcement handled by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has expanded the pilot SMS Sender ID Register throughout 2024 and 2025, helping prevent business message headers from being impersonated by scammers.

The register disrupts SMS impersonation scams involving key brands used in scam communications.

Enforcement actions have been substantial. Besides Commonwealth Bank’s AU$7.5 million penalty, Tabcorp received a AU$4 million penalty and three-year enforceable undertaking for spam violations.  

PointsBet paid AU$500,800 for similar issues.

The National Anti-Scam Centre, launched in July 2023, coordinates efforts across government agencies, banks, digital platforms, and telecommunications companies.

The fusion cell approach—combining data from multiple sources to form actionable intelligence—has shown promise in identifying and disrupting scam operations before they reach critical mass.

What This Means for Brands

If your organization operates in Australia’s financial services or retail sectors, brand impersonation isn’t a theoretical risk but an operational reality you are dealing with right now, whether you know it or not.

The challenge is that traditional brand protection approaches do not map well to this threat landscape.

You cannot just monitor trademark violations or counterfeit physical products. Digital brand impersonation happens across domains you don’t control: social media platforms, bulk SMS services, domain registrars, email systems, and voice communication networks. Attack surface protection solutions provide visibility into these external digital assets, helping organizations identify exposed domains, shadow infrastructure, and brand abuse risks in real time.

Your customers do not distinguish between a scammer impersonating your brand and your actual brand.

When someone loses AU$445 to a fake website using your logo and product images, they blame you. When a phishing SMS arrives from “your” sender ID, the trust damage lands on your balance sheet.

The 60% of Australians who reported increased concern about AI-generated scams in 2024 aren’t being paranoid but responding rationally to a genuine escalation in threat sophistication.

More than a third of Australian consumers now abandon purchases that seem suspicious. That’s lost revenue driven by brand impersonation you might not even know is happening.

The Way Forward

Australian businesses in high-risk sectors need to treat brand impersonation as a board-level risk, not just an IT security concern.

The financial, reputational, and regulatory implications are too significant to relegate this to the back office.

Real-time monitoring across multiple channels is no longer optional.

You need visibility into where your brand appears across social media, dark web forums, newly registered domains, and messaging platforms.

You need to know when someone registers a domain that’s one character different from yours or when fake customer support pages using your branding appear on social platforms.

The speed of response matters enormously. The average lifespan of malicious websites targeting Australians is measured in hours, not days.

If your brand protection strategy involves monthly manual searches, you are already too late.

By the time you discover an impersonation, it is already harvested credentials or processed fraudulent transactions.

Collaboration with platforms, regulators, and industry peers accelerates takedown effectiveness. Additionally, brand protection monitoring allows businesses to detect phishing domains, fake social accounts, impersonation campaigns, and fraudulent mobile apps before customer trust is compromised.

The ACMAs Sender ID Register only works because legitimate businesses participate.

The National Anti-Scam Centre’s fusion cell approach depends on private sector data sharing. Isolated defense doesn’t cut it against coordinated attacks.

Australia’s regulatory environment is tightening, and the Scams Prevention Framework makes this explicit.

Banks, telcos, and digital platforms face mandatory obligations to prevent, detect, and respond to scams, including those involving brand impersonation.

Compliance is not just about avoiding penalties; it is about maintaining the trust that makes digital commerce possible.

The Australian market has become a testing ground for brand impersonation techniques that work globally.

The same AI tools, phishing kits, and multi-channel strategies being refined against Australian targets will spread elsewhere.

Organizations that solve this problem in Australia are building capabilities that will serve them worldwide.