Fraud ranks second behind illicit drugs in its ability to generate a massive cash windfall for criminals, and online rip-offs are driving the returns higher.
When Detective Sergeant Craig Marriott moved across to running the specialised ACT police team, the scale and diversity of online fraud was his first big surprise.
"The scale is enormous; the crooks are usually based offshore and cover their tracks well, and their method of approach is sophisticated," Sergeant Marriott said.
"Criminals don't respect intellectual property; they cut and paste logos and use different tools to generate online material which looks completely convincing.
"From their point of view, all they need is your email address and with so many people doing business online, it's like a foot in your front door."
It's the modern version of stealing letters and bills from your "snail mail" box; now that most bills and personal items arrive via email, that's where criminals want and need access.
It is estimated the crime will cost Australians more than $500 million this year and an international report has found that businesses, on average, lose an estimated 5 percent of their annual revenue to fraud.
Since January 2019, Canberrans have reported 4323 scams to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's ScamWatch service, with financial losses totalling over $2.2 million.
Romance and online dating scams continuing to be one of the most financially devastating, with Canberrans losing over $1 million to these ruses.
Investment scams are also a prime rip-off source, with Canberrans losing nearly $200,000 so far this year.
Consumer Affairs Minister Shane Rattenbury shares police concern about the growth in online fraud.
"Fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated and taking advantage of developments in technology and most people conducting business online," Mr Rattenbury said.
Attempts to gain personal information being the most reported scam type with 1392 so far this year.
Sergeant Marriott said that data harvesting is a growth business and on-line scams to extract personal data may be disguised as innocent social media giveaways, cheap deals, or prize draws.
"It's a sophisticated business model because there's value and commercial benefit in harvesting personal data," he said.
"On one hand, there's the open commercial market which buys and sells your data and which, in general, just results in spam or annoying emails. In most cases, there's nothing too insidious about it.
"But there's also organised criminality involved in data harvesting, collaborating with others. Through data-matching and profiling, they can piece together enough of your personal information to make them appear credible."
His best advice is: if it looks too good to be true, it usually is.
"You can apply this rule across most scams, including the romance and dating ones," Sergeant Marriott said.
"Scammers rely on people being time-poor, complacent, and eager to accept what appears to be a great deal."
He said that anyone making a large financial transaction should be avoid doing so online but instead revert to more traditional means.
