Internet Bureaucrats Protect Us Against Everything Except Online Crime

Australians are particularly susceptible to online scams, despite having a full swathe of internet safety regulators.

Social media apps are displayed on an iPad in Miami, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2024. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Commentary

Australia is a trailblazer in online safety, after all, we were first in the world in 2015 to establish an eSafety Commission—right?

Well, maybe, but so what? Having a Commission is one thing, being “eSafe” is another.

Recent events suggest that even with all our eSafety apparatus we lag significantly behind comparable overseas countries when it comes to actually keeping people safe.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that an Israeli crime gang operating from Serbia had fleeced 90,000 people from 90 countries for a total of €350 million (US$378 million), of which 34,000 (38 percent) people came from Australia and lost €130 million (US$140 million).

That’s quite an outperformance in absolute as well as relative terms, and the only country that came anywhere close was Canada, with 14,000 victims.

Apparently, German police gave a complete dossier, including “victims’ names, phone numbers, emails, physical addresses, identity documents, notes on their background, and total losses,” to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in June 2023, who did nothing with it.

Not even to warn the likely victims to stop further loss, and as a prelude to launching legal action.

Where Are ASIC, ACMA, and the eSafety Commission?

ASIC is solely getting the blame, but this hardly seems fair. While it does have a remit to deal with scams, it’s not the only organisation with this remit.

The police, the eSafety Commission, potentially the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), and the online platforms themselves all have roles to play.

We’ve had Facebook for 20 years now, and social media platforms for even longer, surely we should have our criminal law structures settled by now.

It appears the Germans have, and that the police have the role of rooting out crime on the Internet.

Yet instead of stopping genuine criminals, our authorities have been focused on bullying via the Online Safety Act, and ensuring no one can say anything online which challenges the government line via the Misinformation and Disinformation Act.

Petty Scam, Identity Thefts Galore

I’m sure you’ve personally been offered the scam that was perpetrated—a big smiling face of Mel Gibson, or a similarly high-profile celebrity with an appeal to an older demographic, accompanied by words implying they have a financial secret and you will never have to work again.

Despite being a connoisseur of online scams with a track record for stringing scammers along and wasting their time I’ve never been tempted to click on this one—it seems like a fairly boilerplate kind of scam. But apparently it works, with victims losing an average of A$5,882 (US$3,880) each.

That’s a bit more than petty theft and seems to me to qualify as a larger online harm than a bit of bullying, or some abuse, or God forbid, contradicting the government.

The scam is so obvious and ubiquitous you have to wonder why the authorities have failed to do something thus far, and also why Facebook hosts the ads.

You can’t just buy an ad on Facebook, you and your ad have to go through a vetting process.

A smartphone and a computer screen displaying the logos of the social network Facebook and its parent company Meta in Toulouse, France, on Jan. 12, 2023. Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

With a system like that, there is every chance that Facebook can be legally implicated in the consequences of the fraud by arguing that they benefited from them via payments from advertisers for running the ads and that, at the least, they were recklessly unconcerned as to their legitimacy.

This may give the victims an option for claiming damages, or for one of the corporate regulators to fine them enough to compensate for the losses.

But then the other scam I see consistently is friend requests from fraudulent profiles which should have never been allowed to be registered.

There’s Sarah Scott from Samsung who approached me a couple of times.

The first time, she looked sufficiently real that I accepted, only to be told that I had won money in some purported Samsung competition. Bye bye Sarah, it could have been a lovely friendship.

There’s also the odd CCP agent—invariably female, single, living in Australia, but with all ports before being Chinese.

And even panhandling preachers from India and Africa.

If Facebook can throttle my posts on COVID-19, they can detect these frauds before they even get going.

And every other body connected with policing crime, scams, or Internet safety should have a quick turnover of top staff.

They Have One Job to Do ...

ASIC would obviously be first off the block. Imagine being given the information almost a year ago and doing nothing with it.

The matter only seems to have come to light due to a company called IFW Global blowing the whistle in a submission to a parliamentary committee.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant should be next.

Her job is outlined under Section 27 of her act, and includes 19 separate headings of responsibility, such as “to promote online safety,” “to support and encourage the implementation of measures to improve online safety for Australians,” “to coordinate activities of Commonwealth Departments, authorities and agencies relating to online safety for Australians,” and “to support, encourage, conduct, accredit and evaluate educational, promotional and community awareness programs that are relevant to online safety for Australians.”

In one of the most obvious areas of harm she appears to have failed on all these accounts.

But instead of worrying about real harms online, the Commissioner has been busy picking fights with X (formerly Twitter) and giving it notices to take down content while leaving much more horrendous content online on other platforms, like Facebook, alone.

ACMA also shows itself to be completely incompetent.

It regulates these social media platforms and has negligently allowed them to display fraudulent ads and earn income from them.

Then there is every police force in the country which all have Cybercrime units. It appears none of their plods stroll out on the digital beat. They should be much better placed to deal with these issues than the fancier regulators because they are policemen rather than bureaucrats.

So What Are Their Priorities?

The law enforcement online in this country seems to be yet another example of what I suspect is a national syndrome. Rather than being “doers,” our ruling class have become just talkers who think that issuing a media release with good intentions promising great outcomes is the same thing as actually doing the job.

Recently eSafety Commissioner Inman Grant boasted she was a founder of the Global Online Safety Regulators Network.

“Every year, we see the scourge of online abuse and exploitation grow, and new forms of harm are emerging all the time, such as AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Without coordinated global action we’re limited in our ability to stop it.

“Rather than a global ’splinternet' of inconsistent regulation, we need an effective network of global regulators working together to make the online world safer.”

Love the term “splinternet” in all its Orwellian glory.

The attraction of the Internet was originally that it was controlled by nobody, but that is now apparently one of its failings.

But rather than neologising and globally networking with her international chums and spinning castles in the air, perhaps she could put her mind to real harms in her own country.

There’s a need for real coordination and accountability here. Real old-fashioned harms are being perpetrated on our Internet to real flesh and blood people.