Ep. 34 Why Scam Prevention Is a Cyber Problem with Iain Russell

If financial crime were a country, it would be the third biggest economy after the United States and China.

Iain Russell, threat prevention director at Unphish, joins Annie-Mei and Anika to walk through the shift from awareness to disruption. He talks about how they're using open-source intelligence, pattern matching, and machine learning to take down fraudulent domains, rogue apps, and social media impersonation before any damage is done. Because relying on consumers to spot every threat is just not feasible.

The conversation goes deep on how AI and cheap dark web toolkits have industrialised fraud, lowering the barrier to entry so that almost anyone can run a scam at scale. Iain explains why this isn't just a consumer affairs issue anymore. The money flowing through these pipelines is funding organised crime and, in some cases, destabilising governments.

That brings us to Australia's Scams Prevention Framework (SPF) and why it falls short. With key industry codes still missing, major sectors like superannuation and crypto left out, and no clear roadmap for what comes next, Iain breaks down what good policy could actually look like, and what other countries are already doing that we could learn from.

We need to stop victim blaming people who fall for scams and instead drive change in a world where everyone is expected to operate online.

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