NBN extends Australia’s fibre lottery, MyGov scammers cash in on tax time: Vertical Hold Ep 440

Alex Kidman 

Gee, I hope you’ve got your your lunar roaming app plan activated otherwise that bourbon is going to cost you a lot. What

Adam Turner 

I want to know though, is if it’s the Nokia network, does that mean I need to bash it out on a keypad with predictive text old school.

Alex Kidman 

Because that might be an idea just to survive the lunar conditions maybe just maybe. And that’s really, of course, the network actually stands up because we’re also joined by a man who I’m quietly confident could cause that 4g Moon network to crash just by standing near it. From finder. It’s Angus Kidman.

Angus Kidman 

G’day, G’day. G’day.

Alex Kidman 

So Gus, how much would knock you have to pay you not to board that lunar mission? Was

Angus Kidman 

it this is the problem I was inspired many years ago as a child by Astro Smurf. So I’m determined to get on the moon. So if Nokia doesn’t want me up, they’re going to get they’re going to have to cough up a really big bats.

Alex Kidman 

This sounds like a great business model. I’m even as your PR agent. But in fact, we are not here to concoct wacky and possibly evil mastermind schemes. We’re here this week to talk about scams and how to avoid them. But first, back to our super short and it hasn’t actually been a super show for a while. regular listeners will know what I’m talking about new listeners will be going soup. Is this a soup podcast? Do we listen to the wrong thing? No, you didn’t. As soon as you’re here at vertical health, for the longest time has been the National Broadband Network and NBN. Co. And it had some big headlines with some big numbers of people that can get big speeds. What’s the story he goes? Well,

Angus Kidman 

they have announced that you can now officially start applying to get upgraded to fibre. So if you’re in one of sort of 2 million homes that are currently sitting on fibre to the node or fibre to the curb, you can now find out if you’re eligible for an upgrade. And if you’re eligible an upgrade, you then apply to your ISP to say I want an upgrade, then they send out a track and it does something and eventually you get higher speeds. So this is it’s new that you can apply for this. This is not a new announcement. I think the first announcements they intended to do this go back something like two years, I think possibly one was 2020 when they first said, Hey, we’re going to give people this ability to selectively upgrade themselves. But now that moment has arrived and yay, woohoo. We’re so excited. Except I’m not excited because I can’t get it. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s completely irrelevant, because if I can’t get it, who cares? What’s happening to the other 2 million people?

Adam Turner 

So they’re saying that it’s now going to cover 75% of homes on the NBN. So who does that leave? I’m guessing that the people left out are HFC cable satellite and fixed wireless.

Angus Kidman 

That’s it. It’s satellite and fixed wireless is the big chunk of it. It this new 2 million does leave out some of the people who are this is not everybody who’s on fibre than over fibre to the curb, because there are about 2.8 million of those recorded the most recent numbers, and they’re saying about 2 million people can do this. So there’s 800,000 people there that have been thrown out. HFC is on a separate trajectory where they’re saying, okay, they’re continuing to upgrade that network. So everyone will be able to get gigabit speeds. So when they’re doing these high levels of things they’re counting.

Alex Kidman 

Just to interrupt for a second, I believe with the HFC network, or at least the last time I talked to him in CO about it, their claim was actually 100% of the HFC network can now do that that actually finished that

Adam Turner 

when you say you mean can now offer gigabit speeds, it will now not be replaced with fibre to your house.

Alex Kidman 

Correct? Yes, sorry. To absolutely clarify, the last statement I had from NBN. CO was that 100% of the HSE footprint could apply for gigabit plans through their ISP. And that doesn’t require an upgrade process from the consumer side whatsoever. Although as happened in my case, when I applied for GE it did require an awful lot of jiggling around of cables and then working out what was going on at the time. But that was before they were at the 100% level. So maybe it’s a bit better now.

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, I bet it’s not I could not i I’m on HFC, myself and we are still on monthly day long maintenance outages just to keep the standard surface going. So a while I’m pretty sure that in that height when they’re trying to say, hey, everyone’s got access to high speeds, they’re bundling everybody into that set. Yeah, I take that with the proverbial NBN Co sized grain of salt. Because yeah, it’s one thing to say we’ve got the network, it’s another thing to say that we’re maintaining the network or running it. Well.

Alex Kidman 

The other catch here, though, and we have talked about this before, you’re right, this is not a new story is that in order to get if you’re on fibre to the node, the worst of the fixed line technologies for the NBN. If you’re on fibre node, you can get this upgrade to fibre to the premises, which is more stored technologically should be more stable should be better. But in order to get that you have to punch up the speed tiers, it’s like 100. Meg minimum, isn’t it? If you’re not already there?

Angus Kidman 

Yes, that’s the thing, if you want to do it, they’re not going to do it just for the sake of you saying you’ve got more reliability, you have the same look, I want the speed. So for people who are kind of relatively happy sitting on 50, which is still the majority of them at the moment, you’re going to have to be willing to do that. That, of course means you’re going to have to be willing to spend more money. And that does seem like a fairly extravagant ask in the current state and economic times, shall we say? So whether or not Yeah, yeah, I certainly don’t think there’s going to be a surge of 2 million households saying, Wow, I want to apply for this. And if there were, that’d be bad news, because they’re not going to get it at the same time.

Adam Turner 

But if you can go up from 50 to 100, to get this, that’s still an improvement on the old days, because I’m pretty sure when they started talking about this, you had to ask for a plan that was faster than 100. Before they do this.

Alex Kidman 

I don’t think that’s right. But off the top of my head, I’m not 100. very vague. They were very vague. And the other thing that strikes me about this, that they’ve made this big announcement, and it does lead me to wonder, at what level are they kind of breaking it thinking Hang on times are tough, people aren’t going to want to spend, we better hype this up to try and make sure we can keep that classic old ARPU, the average revenue per user going up because that’s, you know, NBN Co is bottom line. Yes,

Angus Kidman 

there’s no doubt in a general sense. Yes. NBN would like everyone to buy higher speeds that makes them more money. But I also think there’s an element in announcing this, they have to look like okay, we’re trying to give our RSPs more chance to actually sell these services because the reputation of what they’re actually offering the way they’re selling. It has been coming in for a bit of a hammering for decades, really, but it’s not getting any better. And there’s been some recent evidence of that, too.

Adam Turner 

So they’re complaining the RSP. So that’s your retail as your Telstra as your Optus is of the world. They’re complaining that it’s getting harder and harder for them to make any money out of this because they’re getting squeezed by NBN. Yes.

Angus Kidman 

Yes. And I mean, and this leads us into the fantastically complicated world, like, you know, that the NBN one of the reasons that our soup du jour is because it’s so confusing, and nobody knows what the recipe is, no one knows how that actual soup is put together. But yeah, in the model that they use, which involves CVC, no one likes it, he said, possibly NBN. CO itself, everyone else thinks it’s terrible. And right now, the complaint is that it’s almost impossible to sell plants reliably. Because everything’s been frozen. It’s been frozen, because what’s known as the Special Access undertaking, which is what NBN does, so that it’s not completely, you know, ripping off all of its wholesalers, that’s supposed to be under review. It’s they came up with a version, they sent it to the ACO policy, back in March, they actually said, No, we don’t actually like this, we’re going to have formally rejected, we think you can come up with a better version that everyone had till the end of May to send in their submissions. And now they’re thinking about it again. So who knows when it’s asking you this or that. But while it’s not getting sorted out, the existing rules apply. And the order service providers say the existing rules that doesn’t lock letting them do this in a way that remotely means they can deliver a profit. And if they can’t do that, the end result is that some of them are going to exit. And if they will exit, and we as it is, it’s already very concentrated, there’s a handful, maybe half a dozen providers dominate. If you get down to two or three providers, then the notion that competition is going to be good for consumers completely goes out the window. So it’s not a good scenario, but I don’t see an easy fix coming for it anytime soon.

Adam Turner 

So just to recap, in layman’s terms, what CVC means this is my memory of it, tell me if I’ve got it wrong. When Telstra goes to NBN and says gas has ordered a service, we’ve got to connect him up, then NBN allocates Telstra a certain amount of bandwidth to support you. And it’s not the full 100 meg you might have signed up for because they’re relying on the fact that not everybody’s using it flat out all the time. So they might allocate I don’t know, if they make 20 meg or whatever, and say this is your CVC. But that is now stuck at a certain rate. And if you use more than that, they have to pay extra and they want it over time for that, you know, standard allowance to grow but it’s not growing is it which means that people like Telstra and Optus are having to go back and buy more and more data of bandwidth to actually support their customers.

Angus Kidman 

Yes, that’s pretty much it is to stick with that metaphor because it’s the way I used to try and it’s my service to the people you’ve got to think of as like a gigantic bowl of soup, and they bought enough soup that they hope will mean everyone can eat whenever they want. to wait, but they know that if one doesn’t eat 24 hours a day, so they want to buy just enough soup to get away with it and not pay any more for the standard bowl of soup. And what’s happened is that the standard bowl of soup has been held at a certain size for a while they would like the standard offering. But yeah, they’d like to be getting the big bulk assortment of soup available as standard without paying extra add at the moment that’s not happening. So at some point, yeah, the soup wars are really going to kick in,

Adam Turner 

because people’s usage continues to go up.

Angus Kidman 

Yes. And who would have thunk it like? All those years of people saying you’ll never need more of these speeds. But one thing we know about network consumption is it always goes up? The demand is there, there’s been a kind of permanent shift with people working at home. So all of this stuff leads us to believe that Yeah, yeah, then I think everyone agrees that there needs to be a better model for getting agreement on what a better model is that will be approved by the regulator that NBN Co is going to suggest in the first place. And that, you know, ultimately, governments went to bat has proven to be a slow and tedious process and clearly has at least another year to run, I would say before we get any real change. And even then there will be existing contracts. So they would have to be renegotiated. So none of this stuff is going to get fixed this year. And if it gets fixed next year, I’ll be deeply surprised, and I will eat my hat along with the soup.

Alex Kidman 

I happen to know Gus owns some very, very fancy hat. So I look forward to filming this. But speaking of things that are fancy NBN Co came up with a fancy kind of metric to try and sell people on getting higher speed plans, the Call of Duty download speed metric, their official quote was something along the lines of that you’d be able to download a Call of Duty update about 130 gig in 30 minutes on a high speed plan, compared to seven hours on a 50 meg tear. And at first I thought Yeah, look, this is the world’s stupidest metric. And then I thought, well, actually, I suppose it does reflect what people actually do.

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard worse ones. And I think what’s interesting is that they came up with a metric where it still remind you this stuff takes forever even with the fast version of what was taking 30 minutes. This is not super, super exciting. Like I remember the first time I tried out Optus cable back when it was rolled out in the mid 90s. I was very excited to download the I don’t know the size of the file, but it downloaded in 10 seconds flat. And I was amazed and gasped about this when I read about it, because it was almost instantaneous. 30 minutes still feels like Oh blimey, well, I’m just gonna go and play something else on the switch while I wait for that to download. So it’s kind of a bit of an end goal in that way I

Alex Kidman 

will not that it’s on the switch. But my God, if it was on Nintendo’s online infrastructure, that’d be 30 days because this ignores the other reality of all of this stuff that I think people really do need to be aware of, which is the speed that you buy from NBN. CO is not your full flat out speed that you’ll get from every service from now forevermore, because it does depend on the usage of those servers and time of day and all sorts of other factors. Think you know buying a Taylor Swift concert ticket, if you want a good recent example of how to melt a server.

Adam Turner 

So if you’ve got 100 meg connection, but you’re connecting to Sony for PlayStation downloads, and they’re only sending it out at 10 Meg, then it doesn’t matter how fast your connection is. You’re only going to get a 10 Meg?

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yes. It was ever vast. It has always been like that. And while they try and do clever things with CD ends and stuff to speed up those things, they aren’t Yeah, that’s what draws people in. But at the end of the day, the reality is that what people get annoyed about is when they’re streaming doesn’t work. That’s when people actually complain. Well, that’s when you actually get the big wins happening. Whereas, yeah, I think there’s a resigned side when the call of duty patch comes out. And you just know, well, I’m not doing anything there for a while.

Adam Turner 

So Alex, It’s tax time, which means it’s scam time. I hear that you’ve been receiving some interesting messages.

Alex Kidman 

Yes. So I woke up this morning, which sounds like the intro blues. With me here. I woke up this morning, a bom, bom, bom, bom. And I had an SMS. Because seriously, we’re just losing money. But I looked at my phone, and I had a message from the ATO informing me that there was an error in my details, and that my refund of a very specific amount of time that it was like $1,800.17 could not be processed. But hey, they provided me with a handy link that I could click to update my details. Isn’t that great? That’s very convenient when you’re here,

Adam Turner 

right? Definitely looking out for you. Yeah.

Alex Kidman 

Except, of course, you know, as hopefully everyone has realised. No, they weren’t this was a scam. And it struck me that it’s, it’s partially a bit of a classic scam, but it’s also kind of a smart thing in a way because while I didn’t fall for it, I could 100% See the instance in which I might have I’ve just woken up, the coffee hasn’t kicked in. There’s this message. Perhaps I’ve just put my tax return in so I’m waiting for it and I suddenly get this thing which looks quite clear. trouble to the untrained and caffeinated i. So I panic and I click on it and I do it because it looks like that’s what I’ve got to do. Bang, and I’ve got me.

Angus Kidman 

Yes, it’s the classic model because we know that yeah, scammers will always go for the situational moment. So right now, if that’s what’s going on, it’s like, boom, okay, get in here, because you’re thinking about tax. And so they, they’re always going to lean into these opportunities. And unfortunately, people are going to fall for it. We know that time and time again, well, lots of people are aware of it loads and loads of people do it. And if people click on them, that they keep sending them this is the bottom line is a very simple and very annoying business model. And it’s working beautifully for them. And it’s disturbing. I think the big because

Adam Turner 

the three of us have been writing about this stuff for let’s say 20 years and change. But and then big change in writing about scams over that time is the shift from originally these kinds of scams were things about with that were too good to be true. But now modern scams,

Alex Kidman 

iconic COVID doesn’t want to marry me. Exactly. My heart is broken.

Adam Turner 

Right now. The Nigerian prince doesn’t want to share his gold with me. But now modern scams are more about being too mundane to be fake. Does that trend your spotters as well?

Angus Kidman 

That’s absolutely the way that we’ve seen these things shift. So that the classic pattern was I went through, I looked at all the messages that have been automatically moved into the spam folder on my phone, because modern phones are actually pretty good at detecting the worst examples. And 95% of them were to say, Hey, you forgot to pay this road toll. Now, this, of course, is fantastically amusing because I don’t drive and everyone should be very grateful for that fat because it’s that single fat and dramatically improves road safety. But so for me, it’s like, Well, hey, I know that that one is not true. But the fact is, you know, that’s one of the things that everybody has everybody has, you know, Bob, not everybody, huge central people have an E tag. And so they think, Oh, come on, maybe I got that wrong. One of the ones that was called out specifically recently by the a triple C as a growth area for scam was around loyalty programmes. So it was Qantas frequent flyer, and will was every day extra, just saying like, hey, you know, you need to confirm your details. And maybe people don’t think of those things as being they don’t, they’re not sensitive that way they would be their bank, but like 12 million Australians are in Qantas frequent flyer, there’s a really good chance you’re gonna hit that. And frequent flyer points are worth money. If someone knocks them off you they can flog them to somebody else. They’re absolutely a viable currency. So it’s it’s that combination of both, isn’t it? It’s really common. And we’ve seen that for years back when they were telcos Gamzee would be Telstra or Optus, they’re not going to do one that’s going off the southern phone, because the payoff is just not going to be there. And as you say, that admits to that it’s not necessarily about oh, wow, this is astonishing. It’s more like you’re either going to get a refund of a reasonable but realistic amount, or honour. Otherwise, you’re going to pay this $50 Fine. It’s not enormous, but it’s enough for you to think, Hey, hang on, I’ll try and do something about that.

Adam Turner 

Or the big one in the last few years, you missed the parcel delivery, which that’s just huge, because that’s practically everyone’s been getting stuff delivered online for the last few years. And you do sort of panic and go, Yeah, I was waiting for a parcel, click.

Angus Kidman 

Yeah. So the danger is absolutely there. And what we have seen is that the volume of these things, which is has really, really gone up, because when they shifted from doing voice calls to predominantly doing text, you can just bombard people, I think we did find a research last year where three in four people said yeah, that they’ve received at least one scam tax. And even I thought that was a low figure, I thought it should have been more like nine in 10. And the other 10%, were just unconscious and hadn’t looked at their phones for a while.

Alex Kidman 

So these things are prolific, as we say. And we can we can feel as though we know what to look out for. But a lot of people might not. So guess what things in these messages, I kind of give aways that they might not be on the level.

Angus Kidman 

So the bit the the big obvious to the first one is look out for spelling errors, like genuinely a lot of these ones have obvious spelling mistakes in them. So now this presumes that you know how to spell. And that’s not an assumption I make with lots of people these days. But if you do feel vaguely literate, that’s one thing. The second one is take a careful look at the URL because it will be it will not be the right URL. And it will often end these days will often end in a weird domain, it’ll be a dot info, or a.az. Either one of these you haven’t heard about as much, it’s less likely to be a.com. So I think looking at those and thinking they’re suspicious is always a good sign. But the bottom line is, if you see a message like that, don’t respond with anything. If you really think it’s a problem, go and bring that service yourself or log into that service yourself in the normal way and find out if that’s the case, because of the ATO really does your refund, you’ll do that but be cautious about it. Be cautious

Alex Kidman 

about it. So I’ll go a little I will go a little further than that and say the vast majority of businesses these days are not putting links in SMS at all if they’re legit. The ATO certainly doesn’t the classic there is you’ll just get a thing saying you have a new message in your myGov inbox. Full stop the whole thing the two giveaways for this one that I got today were that they spelt government with a Zed in it. And which Yeah, weird but also that there was just a, a URL in there. And it was a really weird big one as well. They weren’t even trying to look as though they were my gov. It was something strange. But an SMS with a link in it to me is almost immediately. Yeah, that’s just not legit at all. And there is nearly always another way for these important services for you look up those details anyway. Yeah.

Good tip.

Adam Turner 

When it comes to getting calls, scammy calls, what I find is the biggest indicator, is if you start to push back, if you start to say no, and they get nasty, they start to threaten you, they start to get aggravated, then that means they’re not legit. The more that the more they try and push you into doing it, the less legit they are. Because if they are legit, and you say, I’m worried about this, I’m not sure it’s real, though it’ll legit one will go Yeah, okay, fair enough, perhaps you can do this, perhaps you could do that. They start threatened to send the cops around or cut your service off or whatever, then they’re not legit.

Angus Kidman 

Absolutely. And again, the thing is, if you do happen to answer the call, whatever, it hasn’t been flagged as everything and they start that discussion, what you have to say is, thank you for letting me know that. But for my own security, I’m going to have to ring you back, I can’t possibly assume this call is legitimate. And I will just say that and then stop and like then if you choose to actually want to bring up your bank, or whoever it is, then do that. And again, if you say that, that’s when they’ll start screaming at you at that exact point. So yeah, as a tactic. If you are going to answer that phone, I understand that some people will go for that I often leave these days until like, if it’s important, they’ll leave me a voicemail or send me a text. So if I don’t know who the number is, I’m probably not going to answer it. But if you do answer it just yet, just that whatever you do, don’t give anyone your details, I think this is the ultimate underlying message of both those things is just do not share information with someone who’s from a link that you’ve clicked, or it’s just or when you get a call, just don’t do that. It’s not worth it.

Alex Kidman 

So I could see some people saying, well, hang on, you know, if they get into my myGov. So what are you know, they can pay my tax bill, haha. But the impact of this could be really significant couldn’t have guessed.

Angus Kidman 

It could be absolutely enormous. Like they are all these estimates of the millions of dollars range leads to scams. And we know that they’re all massive underestimates, because in the most generous assessment, about 20% of people report when they get a scam message, and that’s at the high level, I think it’s most typically it’s more like 5%. So we’re talking big amounts of money and all these services connected my gov Of course, it’s not just the fact that yeah, that can actually he can connect it to your medical records, because it’s aged under Medicare as well. So there’s significant stuff going on there. So any of these services like yeah, they have personal information that’s valuable, even if the account itself is not useful, that makes Craig give away information that they can then use to impersonate you to steal your identity. So there’s a risk in or in almost any service that you’ve signed up for there is potentially risky information in it. So you don’t want any of them to get hacked. Even if your attitude is oh, well, that’s benign. I don’t care about that. I’ve only got 100 Qantas frequent flyer points, what would that possibly worth to anybody, but there’s other personal information stored in these accounts. And once they’ve got a hold of that, that gives them more access to things? And this is, yeah, and if you’re Yeah, if you’re wipe a lot of people in your password on all these things is the same, can potentially open up a massive Pandora’s box at that point, if you’ve been carefully using, you know, Adam Turner is my God 57 As your password for everything that you get into. Back in a minute. Yeah, you really, I mean, hopefully, these days, there’s no reason to be that person. Why, if you’re using a password management service, the one that’s built in with your phone or your browser, then you don’t have to have identical password, you won’t have that problem. But every account that gets hacked into, it’s a real risk. So you do need to, yeah, always err on the side of caution.

Adam Turner 

But as you say, there’s that flow on effect. Because I’m not sure if I talked about this on the podcast or not. A couple of months ago, I got a charge on my credit card from AGL for $5,000, which is very interesting, because I’m not an ideal customer. I rang the bank and said, this wasn’t me. And then I rang AGL just to confirm that I’m not a customer. And the bank said they’d stop it going through and then a couple of days later, AGL tried to take another $1,000 from it. So we had to replace my credit card and go through the whole thing. And what we figured out in the end is that someone had my credit card details. And the way this game usually goes is they sign up for an a GL account. They use by credit card to pay a bill or you know to put some credit into their account and then they withdraw that credit into a different service. So they take it from my credit card into AGL. And then from AGL into their offshore account in the Cayman

Alex Kidman 

Islands, their money laundry basically and

Adam Turner 

it’s not ADLs fault like it could have been anybody but I was you know, the fact that I am not an ideal customer and be How the hell do you get a bill for $5,000 for power, you know,

Alex Kidman 

gas flare, you’ve got running back your house.

Adam Turner 

They would have got my details because I’m pretty careful with this kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me very often. So What I’m thinking is they’ve got my details from somewhere else. I am a Medibank private customer. So I got a feeling that maybe I got caught up in that because I think I did get an email from them saying this was exposed, but not that. But as we know, you can’t really trust what they said in the end, because they kept changing their story about whose details were revealed and what was revealed. But I would, I’m going on the assumption that something like I got caught up in something like that, then my details got sold off. And these people bought my details for 10 bucks on the dark web or whatever, and then just went AGL and sign me up, but not under my name under their name, but with my cart.

Angus Kidman 

And that’s, and that creates that so and it’s so hard to do the forensics on this, even when you’re in a good position, I’ve ever been in a similar position where, again, this was this was not a credit task. And this is where suddenly I logged into my velocity frequent flyer. So hang on, that’s a lot less points than I supposed to have, and realise that somebody else had managed to book a flight between Singapore and based on what a virgin’s partner, and all the points are gone. And I knew I hadn’t done this. And in fact, I knew that I could prove if push came to shove that I was an entirely different country at the time just happened. But I had to go through the wringer with Virgin to get it sorted. And I went through the whole process. And it took it literally took about two months to get this. Then after that I contacted virgin as a journalist to say, Well, can you explain what went on here? Because I was, and they went through? Oh, no, we think you just use this in an internet cafe. And I said, Look, I’m a tech journalist. My suspicion in that case is actually there was an internal problem, I think, because their systems are also accessible to travel agents and things like that, I think someone else would have led the way that like that, but ultimately, they don’t really want you to know that at certain point, if you get the problem resolved, they just kind of go okay, we’ll try and solve this internally. But we don’t want the publicity of this being bad. Obviously, in the case of virgin, I wrote a story about it, because I wasn’t about to let that one lie, but and then they sort of complained and said, Well, that was very unfair. And I said, I’ve published the comments you gave me about it. If you don’t want to give any more detail, that’s not really my fault. Anyway. But here’s the thing, it can happen to anybody what we think of ourselves as technically savvy individuals, but we do all the right things, but nothing absolutely protect you. And that’s why you have to remain alert, and keep an eye on your credit card. And when those $5,000 bills come in, go, well hang on yet, I know power bills are going up and up by them.

Alex Kidman 

And actually, this is a really, really important point, because you kind of said, Oh, look, you know, there’s no excuse for using this and passwords. And you’ve got to be careful and so on. But it is just as important, if not more important. If this does happen to you, as I said at the start, if I had been a little more tired, and I had been waiting on a tax return, I could see myself having stupidly clicked on that link. And I’m sure it would have brought me to a site which looked like the myGov site, everything else might have seemed fine if I didn’t look at the URL, and so on. If this happens to you, it’s actually kind of important not to feel ashamed about it. By all means feel angry, get angry, get outraged, get fixing the problem. But as you said before, Gus, it’s something like 20% of people report this, it’s not a high percentage, which means we don’t really know the full scope of the problem. And one of the best ways we can deal with this. And one of the reasons I wanted this to be one of our topics on the show this week is because it needs as much light on it as possible. People need to know because knowing will help them think about it, the next time it hits them. But the more people will go Oh, well. I’ve been fooled. I’ll just hang my head in shame, but not mention it, then nobody knows and fewer people act.

Angus Kidman 

Absolutely. So it’s just one of those things. Yeah. Be aware, be alert. Don’t be alarmed. Do not click on my golf dot Adam Turner, and you’ll be fine.

Adam Turner 

But also, it’s one of those things where you might know enough to think I’d never fall from that for that, but your friends and relatives might not. So there’s a bit of an education play there as well. You know, if you’re, you know, parents are the generation that our parents are, then they’re very likely to fall for some of this stuff.

Alex Kidman 

Yeah. But equally, you know, it’s it’s it’s kind of easy to paint the seniors as as non tech savvy, and some of them are and some of them are not. But equally it can happen to the young and arrogant. Not the only

Adam Turner 

ones. Yeah. But you know, people have a younger persuasion, have a little bit of a responsibility to help their elder relatives perhaps

Alex Kidman 

recognise absolutely educating everyone is the ideal here to try and minimise the impact because the impact is huge. I looked up SCAMwatch his stats on this for just for identity theft, just for this year, their estimate is over $35 million. And if that’s only 20% of the total that people have lost just to identity theft. This is a big, big, lucrative horrible business. Well, that just about wraps up this week’s episode of vertical hold thanks to Gus for joining us this week. pleasure as always, and we have mixed things up here at vertical hold no more three questions of doom instead, you can promote anything your life it can be your way your work, your social media, something you think people should do, and the contentious thing of the week. What colour shirt top blouse or otherwise body covering Should our listeners wear tomorrow?

Angus Kidman 

Okay, so people can find my writings variously on find a.com That au and my more esoteric stuff at Angus Kidman dot show. You can’t go wrong with red so I’m just gonna say when in doubt wear red because it’s like a red rag to a bull or in this case to the dog we can hear barking in the background.

Alex Kidman 

And as always, Well Adam goes to muffle the sounds of a barking dog you can catch us online at vertical hold au on the artist formerly known as Twitter, the vertical hold Facebook page, Instagram and on the web at verticalhold.com.au

Adam Turner 

Thanks everyone for dropping by. Let us know how you’ve done in the NBN lottery. Let us know how you pick up on scams and just let us know what you think of the show.

Vertical hold is proudly brought to you by Uniden Australia

Alex Kidman 

scam scam scam. Scam scam

yes

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