I recently gave a speech to the Unley Rotary Club on Cybersecurity and awareness of financial scams; the audience had some fantastic follow up questions and many more than I expected. The interesting outcome for me from that presentation was the audience’s sheer diversity of understanding of what scams exist, how they affect people and what someone can do to avoid those risks. Some were genuinely shocked, others apathetic;
It won’t happen to me, I’m not affected as I don’t use Facebook, what can I really do to stop it…?
At Goldsborough, we participate in regular scheduled cybersecurity training throughout the year so my journey of cyber understanding has sadly left me with the cynicism that everything on the internet should be assumed to be dodgy until I can prove otherwise. I say sadly not because scams exist (given scams have been around as long as greed has) but simply the disproportionate amount of my time needed to manage my own information and technology. The rise of A.I. is only going to exacerbate the imperative of protecting ourselves and our own data.
So what can we do to shield ourselves? The government’s scamwatch.gov.au site is an excellent start. It doesn’t just deal with online scams but many different ways scammers will take advantage of large numbers of the public. At least by educating ourselves, we are armed with the knowledge that our technology is both useful and dangerous, it can be our own actions (i.e. giving away personal info) that have led us to being scammed, plus that the more we leave our guard down, the more all of our society will be subjected to onslaught of scammers.
We regularly discuss ways to try to minimise the risks of them being scammed with our clients and I’d much rather be discussing how to avoid scammers, rather than report them when it’s too late… In our world, moving large sums of wealth is commonplace; changing investments, rolling over super, buying/selling a property etc and these transactions need to be processed securely and under tight controls. There are just too many stories of Australians who have built up their life savings only to see the money vanish overseas (or in Australia!).
If you have a significant life change and are thinking about who can provide you with some reassurance about what those changes mean for you or what risks you should consider including cybersecurity, give us a call and we’ll pop you in the diary of one of our advisers for a 15 minute discovery chat to work out if and how we might help.
