Rebate scams: half the reports, nearly three times the losses
Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre recorded a 49.1% fall in rebate-scam reports to Scamwatch in 2025 while losses to the same category rose 170%, from A$1.7 million to A$4.7 million. The report attributes the increase to several high-value cryptocurrency recovery scams, the refund pretext being used against people who had already lost money once.
- Year
- 2025
- Where
- Australia
- Outcome
- Ongoing
- Reported loss
- $3.0 million
- Victims
- Not stated in the sources
- Schemes
- Refund and remote access scams, Recovery scams
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-06
The facts, as recorded
- Reports of rebate scams to Scamwatch fell 49.1% in 2025.
- Losses to rebate scams rose 170%, from A$1.7 million in 2024 to A$4.7 million in 2025.
- The National Anti-Scam Centre attributes the rise to several reports of high-value cryptocurrency recovery scams.
- Reports of remote access scams fell 47.8% and losses fell 37.2%, from A$7.5 million to A$4.7 million.
- The NASC attributes the remote-access decline to detection and disruption by banks and the telecommunications sector.
- Around 86% of reports to Scamwatch involve no financial loss at all, which is why its report counts and loss totals diverge so often.
Why this case matters
Two categories moved in the same year, in opposite ways, and together they show what a genuine disruption looks like against what a merely-shifting one looks like.
Remote access scams fell on both measures. Reports down 47.8%, losses down 37.2%. The National Anti-Scam Centre attributes that to detection and disruption work by banks and telecommunications companies, the sort of intervention that stops calls connecting and stops transfers completing.
Rebate scams did the opposite. Reports nearly halved, losses nearly tripled. That is not disruption; that is the same pretext being aimed at a smaller number of much more valuable targets.
What the refund pretext became
The report is specific about where the extra money came from: high-value cryptocurrency recovery scams. That is a category jump. A rebate scam used to be a small overpayment story, a refund processed wrongly, please return the difference, worth a few hundred dollars.
Attached to somebody who has just lost six figures to a crypto investment fraud, the same “we owe you money” framing is worth vastly more. See recovery scams.
What it tells you about the scheme
The refund and rebate pretext is a wrapper, not a scam in itself. It can hold a overpayment story or a ,000 recovery story, and the operators move it to whichever target population is currently worth the most. Watching only report counts would have shown this category shrinking in a year when the harm it caused nearly tripled.
Sources
- 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: All percentages and dollar figures above, from the Appendix 1 Scamwatch analysis of the report published 30 March 2026.