Mum sent money to a scammer. What to do in the next hour.

If you're reading this at 11pm having just worked out what's happened, start with the box above and come back to the rest. Nothing below is more urgent than the phone call.

And before anything else: she is not stupid, and you are not too late to help. Australians lost $2.18 billion to scams in 2025. These scripts are written and tested by organised crime groups, and they are designed to work on careful people at the exact moment their guard is down.

The first hour, in order

1. Her bank, immediately. Use the number on the back of her card, or the bank's app. Say plainly: "My mother has been scammed and money has left her account." Ask them to attempt a recall of the payment and to put a hold on the account. If money has gone in the last few hours, there is a real chance some of it is still sitting in the receiving account.
2. Stop any further payments. Scammers often stage the theft across several transfers. If she has scheduled another payment, or has given out card or online banking details, tell the bank that too so they can block the card and reset her access.
3. Cut contact with the scammer. Don't reply, don't explain, don't try to get the money back yourself. Block the number or email. If they have remote access software on her computer — anything she was asked to install — disconnect it from the internet before you do anything else.
4. IDCARE, on 1800 595 160. Free, government-funded, and the single most useful call after the bank. A counsellor builds a specific plan for what was exposed. Open Monday to Friday, 8am–5pm. Some banks have a referral code that speeds things up — CommBank customers use CBAIDC — so ask her bank if they have one.
5. After hours: 1300 292 371. The Australian Cyber Security Hotline runs 24 hours, seven days. Worth knowing, because most of these discoveries happen on evenings and weekends when IDCARE is closed.
6. Report it. Scamwatch feeds the National Anti-Scam Centre, which is how warnings reach other families. ReportCyber creates the official police report, which banks and insurers sometimes ask for.

The right most families never hear about

Almost every guide tells you to complain to your own bank. Fewer mention the other one.

Since 12 March 2026, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority can consider complaints about the bank that received the money — not just the bank that sent it. You do not have to be a customer of that bank to complain about it.

That matters because the money almost always lands in a "mule" account: an account opened with stolen identity documents, or one belonging to someone recruited to move funds. Grounds for a complaint against a receiving bank include failing to act on a fraudulent account opening, and failing to freeze funds once they were told about the scam.

The order is: complain to the receiving bank directly first, in writing. If you're not satisfied, take it to AFCA. It's free. Do the same with her own bank if you think they missed something obvious — an unusual transfer from an account that has never made one before, for instance.

The next call is the dangerous one

This is the part to tell her tonight, even if you tell her nothing else.

Her details are now on a list that gets resold. One in three scam victims is scammed more than once, and the follow-up is often crueller than the first, because it's aimed precisely at the wound: the desire to get the money back.

No legitimate organisation charges a fee to recover scammed money. Not the police, not Scamwatch, not the ACCC, not your bank, not a lawyer who cold-calls. Any offer to trace funds, recover cryptocurrency, or "release" a frozen transfer for a payment is a second scam operated by people who know exactly what happened to her, because they were often the ones who did it.

The same applies to anyone who rings claiming to be following up her Scamwatch report. Real agencies don't ask for payment, and they don't ask for remote access to her computer.

How to have the conversation

Here is the number that explains why families find out too late. More than 90% of Australians think talking about scams with family helps — but only 8% say they would be comfortable telling their family they'd been scammed, according to research commissioned by CommBank.

Victoria Police put it more bluntly: shame, embarrassment, and a fear of looking incapable in front of adult children stop people coming forward, and by the time the family finds out, the money has moved offshore.

So the goal of this conversation isn't to establish what happened. It's to make sure the next one gets reported in ten minutes instead of ten days.

• Lead with the crime, not the mistake. "These people do this for a living and they're very good at it" is true, and it's a completely different sentence from "how did you not realise?"
• Don't audit her. Resist the urge to go through the whole thing looking for the moment she should have known. She has already done that, repeatedly, on her own.
• Ask before acting. "Would it help if I rang the bank with you?" lands very differently from taking her phone and doing it. Older Australians consistently value independence over protection, and a response that feels like supervision often ends the conversation for good.
• Name the follow-up risk out loud. This is practical, not emotional, so it's the easiest part to say — and it's the part most likely to prevent the second loss.
• Leave one rule behind. One sentence she'll actually remember beats a lecture. The best one: if anyone contacts you about money, you hang up and ring me, or ring the number on your own card.

Why it was her, and not you

It's worth understanding, because it shapes what actually helps afterwards.

Australians over 65 accounted for around 31% of the losses reported to Scamwatch, despite being a little over 17% of the population. That isn't about capability. It's structural: they answer calls from unknown numbers, they were raised in an era when a caller claiming to be the bank almost certainly was the bank, and they're more likely to have savings worth stealing and to be at home when the phone rings.

Confidence follows the same pattern. About a third of Australians under 60 say they're very confident spotting a scam. Over 60, that drops to roughly one in five — and unlike the loss figures, that gap is one a family can actually close.

Stopping the next one

The instinct after a loss is to take over: manage her accounts, screen her calls, tell her not to answer the phone. It rarely holds, because it costs her independence and asks you to be permanently available.

What works better is giving her somewhere to check that isn't you, so that checking becomes a habit instead of an imposition. The pattern that sticks in real families is small:

• One number saved in her phone she can send anything to — a text, a screenshot, or just a description of a phone call.
• An answer in seconds, at any hour, so there's no reason to guess and no reason to wait until morning.
• Someone else told when it's serious, so a real scam doesn't stay a private problem she has to decide about alone.

That's the shape of what we built. Is it a scam? gives her one Australian number to forward anything to — text, email, WhatsApp, or a photo of a letter — and sends back a plain-English verdict in seconds. There's no app to install and nothing new for her to learn. When something is a genuine scam, you're told; when it's nothing, you're not bothered. And if she isn't sure, she can reply ASK and the question goes to the whole family at once, so the decision is never hers alone.

It won't undo what happened this week. It does mean the next message gets checked in thirty seconds by something that isn't her memory of a bad afternoon.

Common questions