Gone phishing: The sophisticated scammers infiltrating email accounts

"Everybody knows someone who has either been scammed or attempted to be scammed."

It's been a cruel lesson for one of Australia's top racehorse trainers, Rob Heathcote, who has spoken publicly as a warning to other Australians after he was scammed out of $100,000 trying to buy a Mercedes-Benz for his wife.

Speaking on Nine's new Anatomy of a Scam podcast, the Brisbane-based trainer says he will forever be "kicking himself" for falling victim to the sophisticated scam.

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He paid a deposit in December 2021 and was told that there would be delays getting the car.

Emails were sent back and forth for some months.

"It was at that time that we ceased to communicate via phone and it was pretty much exclusively done via email," he said.

"Sometime during that period, we don't know exactly when, a hacker, a scammer intercepted emails from Mercedes-Benz to me, and ultimately from myself to Mercedes-Benz, and then started to play each of us other against each other, in an attempt to create the illusion that I was actually talking to Mercedes-Benz."

It's a scam known as business email compromise, a type of phishing attack.

AFP Commander Cybercrime Operations Chris Goldsmid explained on the podcast that, unfortunately, it's the sort of scam that is becoming increasingly common in Australia.

"One of the scam types that we are really focused on is business email compromise, and that's a particularly nefarious type of scam where criminals will compromise an email account and then use that email account to send legitimate-looking to try and trick people into sending payments to the wrong account," he said.

"It's a really common type of scam in Australia.

"So it's causing significant loss, with the average cost per incident of $50,000."