Westpac will finally cross-check the account name and payment details of payments made by its customers, the bank has announced as banking and government bodies join forces to create an ‘intel loop’ that authorities believe will actively blunt scammers’ “core tools”.

In an effort to head off potential losses to investment and fake invoice scams – in which scammers substitute new bank details to take often large sums of money from oblivious customers – Westpac customers adding a new payee to their account will now be automatically alerted when the name on that account doesn’t match the details they have entered, or when Westpac has not made a payment to the account in the past.

Known as Westpac Verify, the new feature is designed to “help individuals and small businesses identify potential scams before they’ve made a payment,” head of fraud prevention Ben Young said as the new protections were announced.

Surging losses to investment and fake invoice scams – which the ACCC’s Scamwatch service reports took $292 million and $28 million, respectively, from Australians in 2023 – have fuelled an escalating response by banks and payment providers, who are tapping AI and introducing new features to detect scams before they take victims’ money.

The new feature – as well as an extension of Westpac’s SaferPay capability that will now interrogate small business customers about potentially risky transactions before allowing them to proceed – “helps to shut down scams which rely on the victim not realising they’re paying a scammer instead of their intended recipient,” Young said.

SaferPay, which was introduced in March and originally only covered payments by consumers, has already blocked $1 million in potential scam payments – part of an expanding range of anti-scam measures that, the bank said, saved customers over $120 million in potential scam losses during the first half of the current fiscal year.

The new measures are expected to increase detection of scams, with customer transactions more actively checked in real time and new requirements forcing them to enter descriptions for payments made to other bank accounts via Westpac’s mobile app.

“The more information we know about a payment,” Young said, “the more our fraud systems can find the likely scams among the millions of genuine payments.”

A long time coming

Westpac’s latest account name matching features – which echo the similar NameCheck feature recently introduced by the Commonwealth Bank and anti-fraud protections implemented by the NAB and ANZ – address a glaring hole in payment security that has allowed scammers to manipulate BSB and account details to milk Australians of millions.

Similar protections have been available overseas for years, and the ACCC two years ago called for banks to improve Australian customer protections – echoing years of customer complaints as to why banks weren’t undertaking what would seem to be a simple check.

Even as real-time payment technologies like the New Payments Platform (NPP) enable scammers to move funds offshore in the blink of an eye, banks have only recently accelerated their rollout of anti-scam protections – no doubt chastened by the PayID lookup scams that exposed hundreds of thousands of bank customers’ account details.

With a growing number of collaborative bank initiatives steadily shutting down scammers’ techniques, a recent NAB study noted that 40 per cent of respondents said they had been contacted by their bank about a potential scam payment in the last year – of which three-quarters said they had taken action to avoid losing money.

Such successes have seen banks and regulators quietly claiming victories over scammers, with the Australian Banking Association (ABA) last month welcoming new National Anti-Scam Centre (NASC) data suggesting overall scam losses had declined by 10.8 per cent quarter on quarter.

Intelligence combined

Losses reported to the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) were down 41.2 per cent over the same period – lending weight to a newly announced scam intelligence initiative that will see the NASC and AFCX working alongside increasingly proactive banks, telcos, and digital platforms to present a unified front in the fight against scammers.

Streamlined data sharing through an ‘intel loop’ amongst the entities will see the NASC share and receive intelligence about scam phone numbers, URLs, and bank accounts that, Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones said, are “core tools scammers use to ply their act.”

The intel loop “is all about putting forward a united, coordinated front so scammers can’t reach their victims,” Jones continued, noting that scammers “aren’t mugs, they’re cunning criminals who adapt and change their tactics – and we need to be able to do the same.”

“Better and faster intelligence sharing across the entire scams chain will be critical to stopping scammers in their tracks,” ABA CEO Anna Bligh said in welcoming the establishment of the intel loop, which she called a “show of strength” that “will make Australia an even harder place for scammers to operate.”