Australians scammed out of A$3,000 or less could be able to claim automatic reimbursement from banks, phone companies or tech companies, under a new federal government proposal.

Last year, there were 481,523 scam reports in Australia, worth A$2.18 billion, with a median loss of $400, a recent official report found. That was up 7.8% from the year before, but down since scams peaked at $3.1 billion in 2022.

At first glance, if the median scam amount was $400, being able to easily reclaim $3,000 might sound generous.

However, once you start digging deeper into data on Australian scams – then compare it with a similar scheme in the United Kingdom – $3,000 starts to look like an oddly low threshold.

Who would win under the new proposal?

On Thursday, the federal government released new details of its Scam Protection Framework, which will make banks, telcos and digital platforms set up stronger anti-scam systems by March next year.

Part of that new framework is a proposed dispute resolution process, making banks, telcos and digital platforms “automatically reimburse scam victims for verified scam losses below $3,000”.

The goal of those automatic repayments would be to prevent low-value scam claims needing to go through costly dispute resolutions. That would save time and stress for scam victims, and avoid wasted time for police and the companies involved.

The reimbursement costs would be shared by the banks, telcos and digital platforms, which would repay people scammed via their........

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