"Hi Mum": Australia names the WhatsApp version and counts it
The ACCC issued a formal alert on 23 August 2022 after more than 1,150 Australians lost A$2.6 million to family impersonation messages in seven months, most of them in June and July. It is the first national regulator to name and count the WhatsApp form of the emergency scam separately from the telephone one. Reports reached 9,307 in the first nine months of 2023.
- Year
- 2022
- Where
- Australia
- Outcome
- Ongoing
- Reported loss
- $1.8 million
- Victims
- 1,150
- Schemes
- "Hi Mum" and family impersonation texts, Grandparent and family emergency scams
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-06
The facts, as recorded
- More than 1,150 Australians reported losing money to "Hi Mum" scams in the first seven months of 2022, totalling A$2.6 million.
- The vast majority of those reports came in June and July 2022 — a two-month concentration, not a steady trend.
- 82% of family impersonation scam reports came from people aged over 55, who accounted for 95% of all reported losses.
- Women over 55 were more than two-thirds of victims and lost A$1.4 million of the total.
- Scamwatch received 9,307 "Hi Mum" family impersonation reports between 1 January and 30 September 2023.
- Impersonation scams of all kinds made up more than 70% of the 234,672 reports Scamwatch received in that nine-month period.
- The ACCC's advice is to call the person on the number already stored in your phone, to confirm whether it is genuinely out of use.
Why this case matters
Australia was the first country to treat the WhatsApp version of the family emergency scam as a thing with its own name and its own count.
That sounds like bookkeeping. It is not. Until a regulator separates “someone phoned pretending to be your grandson” from “someone messaged pretending to be your daughter”, both disappear into a category called emergency or impersonation, and nobody can see that the second one is growing.
The shape of the spike
The striking figure in the August 2022 alert is not the A$2.6 million. It is the timing: more than 1,150 victims across seven months, with the vast majority reported in June and July.
That is not a trend. It is a campaign — a technique found, industrialised and run hard for two months by people who were doing something else before and would do something else after. Scam volume by channel behaves like this routinely, and it is why single-year comparisons mislead.
Who it reached
82% of reports came from people over 55, and that group accounted for 95% of the money. Women over 55 were more than two-thirds of victims and lost A$1.4 million.
The over-55 concentration is worth reading carefully, because the obvious explanation is wrong. This is not a scam that targets people who are bad with phones — it is a message sent to a parent, and the population with adult children who might plausibly change their number skews older by definition. The scheme selects a family role, and the age distribution follows.
What happened next
The technique did not stop. Scamwatch recorded 9,307 “Hi Mum” reports in the first nine months of 2023, against 1,150 loss reports in seven months of 2022 — different measures, but a clear direction.
By that point impersonation scams of every kind were more than 70% of everything Scamwatch received. The “Hi Mum” message had gone from a two-month spike to a permanent fixture of the landscape.
The advice, and why it is the right advice
The ACCC’s guidance is unusually specific: call the person on the number already stored in your phone, and see whether it is genuinely out of use.
It is better than “be suspicious of unexpected messages” because it is a single action with a binary result, and it defeats the pretext directly. The message’s entire foundation is that the old number no longer works. One call tests exactly that claim, and it takes ten seconds.
Sources
- ACCC warning of suspicious messages as "Hi Mum" scams spike. Scamwatch / ACCC, Australia. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: The 23 August 2022 alert, the 1,150 victims and A$2.6m, the June–July concentration, the age and gender breakdown, and the stored-number advice.
- Scams Awareness Week 2023 empowers consumers to ask "Who's really there?". Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: 9,307 "Hi Mum" reports from 1 January to 30 September 2023 and impersonation scams as over 70% of 234,672 reports.
- Targeting scams: report of the National Anti-Scam Centre on scams data and activity 2025. National Anti-Scam Centre (ACCC), Australia. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: Later Australian text-message scam volumes and losses for context.