Australia’s financial sector has marked a major milestone in the fight against online crime, as new figures reveal the impact of its real-time intelligence-sharing network one year after launch.
BioCatch Trust Australia, created through the collaboration of five of the country’s largest banks, has analysed more than 180m payments in the third quarter of 2025 alone, covering over $330bn in transactions.
Its latest report confirms that the network identified over $60m in attempted fraud during that period, highlighting the scale of threats facing digital banking customers.
The network now protects more than 85% of Australia’s banked population, using behavioural insights to detect patterns consistent with scams and fraudulent activity.
BioCatch SVP of emerging solutions and network Tim Dalgleish said the platform’s matching capability has become a powerful defence against social engineering, noting that “in better than 70% of those transactions, BioCatch Trust reliably retrieved the beneficiary’s account profile, assessing the end-to-end payment risk before any money left the sender’s account.” Dalgleish added that “when the network makes that match, its signals now detect better than 70% of social engineering scam payments.”
The findings appear in BioCatch’s new publication, 2025 Digital Banking Fraud Trends in Australia, which also reports a 20% drop in money laundering activity among the company’s domestic customer base. However, the broader threat environment remains severe. BioCatch director of global fraud intelligence Thomas Peacock said “we do see account takeover attempts in Australia increasing by 47% in the last year and more than doubling in the last six months.” Peacock attributed much of this escalated activity to structured campaigns from organised criminal groups.
These attacks are frequently linked to large-scale scam operations across Southeast Asia. Emerald Sage, principal intelligence advisor at OSINT Combine, said “Southeast Asia is home to a vast network of scam compounds, which serve as the launchpads for much of the online fraud targeting Australians.” She added that these criminal hubs are deeply embedded across the region and “are not isolated enterprises but nodes in a wider criminal economy spanning mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.”
The report also includes analysis from Toby Evans, head of economic crime at the Australian Payments Network, who argues that the recent wave of scam activity has exposed a structural gap in payment system design.
He calls for a new principle—Safety by Design—to sit alongside established privacy and security standards. Australian Payments Network head of economic crime Toby Evans said, “the digital payments landscape continues to evolve, from AI-driven e-commerce to cross-border links between fast payment systems.” He added that embedding safety into the foundations of payment architecture is essential so systems remain “innovative, secure, and resilient without forcing consumers to shoulder risk.”
The findings underscore both the progress in collaborative fraud prevention and the enduring challenges posed by increasingly sophisticated criminal networks.
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