ASIC warns again on super scammers

Tom Ravlic

Vulnerable Australians are being warned yet again by the corporate cop to avoid getting sucked in by scammers selling self-managed superannuation fund solutions on the phone.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has detailed its concerns about new scams being promoted by email and phone calls.

These scams involve fake financial advisers telling people to transfer superannuation balances into a self-managed superannuation fund that the promoters claim will give them 8 to 20 per cent growth.

This is typical of scams of this kind: promises of greater returns during a period while banks are only providing threadbare interest for those that have short term deposits.

Part of the trick employed by scammers is that they will use the names that sound like reputable investment houses that have financial services licenses so that a potential victim develops a level of trust in what is being said.

These lowlifes set up a business structure and bank accounts to lull people into thinking what is going on is legitimate..

Scammers also take advantage of the fact they are given access to confidential information belonging to the client in order to shift funds from superannuation accounts into a purported self-managed superannuation fund.

This is nothing novel or new for the corporate regulator given that ASIC and its teams of investigators get these complaints all the time. The patterns of behaviour are not novel as these bad actors spin a story of gains that do not materialise for their target.

The ACCC has multiple volumes of its annual report on scams and it gets worse each year. The digital environment sees the financially vulnerable deliberately targeted with emails, texts, and phone calls.

There is something those of us close to the financial services sector need to remember. Some of these tactics will be new to people who are unfamiliar with the tactics and have not watched, listened to, or read about scammers and their tactics.

It is rather perplexing that financial institutions have web pages dedicated to detecting fraud of various kinds, regulators have a mountain of material alerting people to what the charlatans do, but that somehow does not seem to be enough to prevent people from getting caught up in these webs woven by bad actors dead set on enriching themselves.