Scams have hit the ACT hard this year, with losses at topping $6.5 million from January to November this year.
The ACCC say this is a 130 per cent increase in scams for 2021 compared to 2020, which had reported $3.1 million in losses.
Investment scams are the highest with people losing $2.9 million, while dating and romance scams came in second at $1.9 million losses.
Legal Aid ACT solicitor Er-Kai Wang specialises in older persons' services and warns people not to be complacent as it can happen to anyone.
"People often think bad things won't happen to them, which is what gets a lot of clients to fall into scamming troubles. This is an issue not just for older people but the broader population in general," Ms Wang said.
"When people get scammed they often can't believe they fell victim to it, so even when they have lost a huge amount of money they usually avoid telling their kids or relatives because of the sheer embarrassment and shame."
"Dating and romance scams particularly have happened a lot, which can be truly devastating for people as it takes them on this emotional roller coaster learning they hadn't found a partner, then been tricked and to top it off had money stolen."
The legal avenues available to people who have been scammed are slim, due to the lack of accountability with perpetrators often using sophisticated measures to avoid being tracked.
"Once the money's gone, it is gone. People have no way of tracing who's received it because of the online platforms that scammers are operating under, which can be in a different state or even another country," Ms Wang added.
"The online environment is almost boundary-less, with no significant limits unless you operate under dictatorship-style sensors that I doubt our democratic government is willing to put in place, making it difficult to work out who's responsible and who's accountable for what."
"That's why reporting a scam is really important because without it you cannot know the scale of an issue and because of the stigma I think the number would be a lot higher than what's recorded."
Dr Vanessa Teague is an ANU researcher in cryptography who says more onus should be placed on organisations to make it clear to customers when they are communicating compared to a scammer trying to impersonate them.
"You get a text or a phone call and you're trying to distinguish a genuine call from a scammer which unless you've gone out of your way to establish a cryptographic verification is difficult so legitimate authorities should make their communications look less like scams," Dr Teague said.
"For example getting notifications on exposure sites related to the QR apps, instead of sending a text the app now has implemented a notification within the app which is a lot better because originally you would get a text or phone call which is easy for a scammer to replicate."
"Another option is when companies like Telstra call, which have many scammers trying to replicate their communications, they could give a customer a client number and tell them to call their phone line from their website."
"So there are heaps of things legitimate organisations can do to help vulnerable people being able to better distinguish from scams."
