Action on scams, spam, and telemarketing: October to December 2023

We have 2 compliance priorities for the 2023–24 financial year for unsolicited communications and scams:

Combating SMS scams: Working to prevent SMS scams from reaching Australians by:

• enforcing existing rules
• collaborating with Australian and global partners
• exploring new ways to stop scam messages that impersonate legitimate brands or organisations.

Enforcing e-marketing unsubscribe rules: Concentrating on businesses that don’t action opt-out requests. In particular, those that may cause significant harm like direct marketing of gambling, alcohol and ‘buy now, pay later’ products and services.

Combating scams

We continue to take the fight to scammers to disrupt their activities and protect Australians. 

This quarter, telcos reported blocking over 246.7 million scam calls and over 106.7 million scam SMS under ACMA-registered rules. This brings the total number of scam calls blocked to over 1.8 billion, and the total number of scam SMS blocked to 443 million since these rules were introduced. 

We took action against Message4U, DirectSMS and SMS Broadcast (the MessageMedia entities), Esendex and MessageBird after our investigations found they breached the reducing scams industry code.

The ACMA found the vulnerabilities created by Esendex, MessageBird and the MessageMedia entities were used by scammers to send SMS impersonating well-known brands and government services. 

Our investigations are helping to close weaknesses exploited by scammers.

We also:

• Issued a $259,440 infringement notice and accepted an enforceable undertaking following an investigation into Medion Australia. This found it breached the Telecommunications Service Provider (Customer Identity Authentication) Determination 2022 identity authentication rules on more than 1,600 occasions. 
• Successfully commenced a pilot phase of a Sender ID Registry to help prevent business message headers in SMS from being impersonated. We are now progressing with expanding the pilot, which provides some protection until a decision is made about the final format of the registry. 
• Continued to support the work of the National Anti-Scam Centre that was launched by the ACCC on 1 July 2023 under the Government’s Fighting Scams initiative. 
• Issued consumer alerts about unexpected prize and voucher scams, sales season package delivery scams, and toll operator impersonation scams.
• Continued to work behind the scenes with telcos, government agencies and well-known brands to disrupt phone scams. This includes providing data and intelligence products to telcos and government agencies.

Find out more about how to protect yourself from phone scams.

Enforcing e-marketing unsubscribe rules

Key actions and outcomes in our focus on unsubscribe rules include:

• Uber Australia paid a $413,000 infringement notice after it breached the Spam Act by sending commercial messages without consent and a functional unsubscribe facility.
• Kmart Australia paid a $1.3 million infringement notice after it breached the Spam Act by sending commercial electronic messages without consent. We have also accepted a comprehensive 3-year, court-enforceable undertaking that commits it to appointing an independent consultant to review compliance with the Spam Act.
• Ticketek paid a $500,000 infringement notice after repeated breaches of the Spam Act by sending commercial electronic messages (email and SMS) without consent. Ticketek was previously issued a formal warning for non-compliance with the Spam Act. We have also accepted a comprehensive 3-year, court-enforceable undertaking committing it to appointing an independent consultant to review its compliance with spam rules, and to make improvements where needed. It must also report regularly to the ACMA.
• We gave 607 compliance warnings with targeted fact sheets to businesses identified from complaints that indicated potential issues with meeting unsubscribe requirements.

We are seeing many instances where SMS with alpha tags fail to comply with unsubscribe rules in the Spam Act.

What is an alpha tag?

An alpha tag appears in the sender identification field of an SMS. When an SMS is sent in Australia, the sender identification field is usually either:

• a mobile number – standard Australian mobile number
• an alpha tag – a string of 3 to 11 letters and/or numbers. For example, the message below has the alpha tag ‘myGov’:

Why does an alpha tag impact the unsubscribe option on a SMS?

Using an alpha tag will impact the type of unsubscribe function that can be used in an SMS. This is because: 

• a mobile number allows for 2-way communication (it can receive replies)
• an alpha tag only allows for one-way communication (the recipient cannot reply to an alpha tag).

How does one-way communication affect my SMS unsubscribe?

A message recipient cannot unsubscribe by replying to a message that only allows for one-way communication. This means that they won’t be able to unsubscribe if they receive an SMS with an alpha tag by following an instruction such as ‘Unsub reply stop’:

In this situation, the unsubscribe facility does not function. 

What do I need to do when using an alpha tag?

If you use an alpha tag, make sure that the unsubscribe statement does not ask the recipient to reply to the message. Use an alternative unsubscribe function, such as including a specific phone number that a consumer can send a ‘Stop’ SMS request to. 

The ACMA recommends always testing that your unsubscribe facility works before sending out marketing messages. If in doubt, you may wish to talk to your SMS messaging provider for alternative SMS unsubscribe options. 

Learn more about unsubscribe laws.

We commenced one anti-scam investigation and finalised another 6 in the quarter. We also had a further 3 anti-scam investigations underway at the end of the quarter. 

We finalised 2 spam investigations in the quarter, with one underway at the end of the quarter. 

We took an average of 4.2 months to complete spam investigations and 4.6 months to complete anti-scam investigations.

We monitored compliance with 16 court-enforceable undertakings in force during the quarter. We set out actions businesses must take to improve their compliance with spam and/or telemarketing laws.

View our enforcement actions for breaches of spam and telemarketing laws.

View our enforcement actions for breaches of scam laws.
 

Finalised investigations

We received more than 6,400 complaints from consumers about alleged breaches of telemarketing and spam laws in the second quarter of the 2023–24 financial year:

• Although scams were the top category for complaints, they continued to trend downwards, with lower complaint numbers than the previous quarter and the same period last year.
• The most common complaints (excluding scams) were about retail, building and maintenance, and the solar sector. 
• Another trend is a continued reduction in complaints about telemarketing calls by the financial services industry. These are down 70% since 2020.
   

Complaints received by financial year

_{Note: We have also received 33 complaints about commercial instant messages so far in 2023–24.}
 

Complaints received about scam calls and SMS

Where we receive enough information, we alert businesses about potential compliance issues raised in complaints. One alert can relate to several issues or complaints. 

Compliance alerts given to businesses 

Find out more about spam and telemarketing rules and what actions you can take, including making a complaint. 

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Access the data

Download the accessibility file for the charts in this report. 

Data file: Action on scams spam and telemarketing – October to December 2023 (10.9 KB)