Telco's new scam-busting tool blocking suspicious text messages

In recent times Australians have been bombarded with scam texts which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to pick apart from the real deal.

But now Telstra has flicked the switch on scammers with a scam-busting tool, which works at the network level to stop suspicious text messages before they reach peoples phones.

And the tool is desperately needed.

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In 2021, Scamwatch received more than 67,180 reports of text message scams alone, fleecing Aussies of a staggering $10 million, which is more than double the amount of reports in 2020.

"They're usually saying you've won money or there's a parcel coming, do you want to track it?" Telstra's Chief Information Security Officer, Narelle Devine, told A Current Affair.

"We're looking to block nearly 100 million of those text messages each and every month.

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"Essentially we use machine learning to look for patterns in the SMS' and we're able to scan those and block them at scale."

She said they process around 50 million text messages every day and currently "block nearly 10 million scam phone calls, as well".

"We've been running a pilot using this technology for the past few months internally and we've had two and a half thousand of our own staff trialing it, to ensure we've got the filters tuned exactly right," Ms Devine said.

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But it has raised concerns with some about the telcos' abilities to scan private messages.

"Where we need to look to ensure we are applying the filters correctly, all that data is anonymised so nobody knows who that message is from - who, to who," Ms Devine said.

Cyber Crime expert Nigel Phair from the University of New South Wales said there are two ways scammers can get numbers.

"One is, they use software that randomly generates the numbers," Mr Phair said.

"Second is from data breaches, where we put our number into competitions and that's subsequently been breached and sold by criminals."

But he believes scammers may learn to adapt to the blocks.

"As we get better through our telcos at trying to identify these scam messages - the scammers will pivot; continually look at what works and what doesn't work."

While the tool is bad news for scammers, there's also some bad news for people sick of pesky political ads.

Unfortunately laws don't allow telcos to block them too.