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In 2023, heavily pregnant Hope Clifford and her husband, Tom, were making plans to build their dream house. “We’d found a block of land just outside Dubbo [NSW],” says Hope Clifford. “Like most Australians who have bought a house, we know the legal contract exchange can be complex, but we had done it before.”
After receiving an email from their solicitor asking them to deposit their $250,715 settlement funds into a bank account, the couple went to their local NAB branch with the email containing the payment instructions. “The bank teller processed the transaction,” says Clifford, “and I then sent our solicitors an email with the receipt of payment.”
About three weeks later, the couple received an email from their solicitor with an invoice for the full $250,715 attached. Confused and worried, they phoned immediately, and it was soon established that the solicitor’s email account had been hacked. A fraudulent invoice had been sent to the couple that saw them transfer $250,715 into a Commonwealth Bank mule account. This put their dream of building a home in jeopardy and set off a nearly two-year-long legal battle for reimbursement of the lost funds.
Hope and Tom Clifford fought for years after scammers intercepted their property settlement.
Unfortunately, the Cliffords are not alone, with more than 108,000 scams, and associated financial losses of about $174 million, reported to the National Anti-Scam Centre’s Scamwatch by Australians in the first half of 2025. Fake websites, online advertisements and making contact through social media were the criminals’ preferred methods of reaching people.
Alex Brooks, of the Scam Victim Alliance, says the Cliffords are typical in that people rarely know they are the victim of fraud until it’s too late. “There are no clear red flags for most modern financial scams,” says Brooks. “Criminals evolve and move to the most successful tactics faster than ever before. A common pattern is your scammer pretending to be someone you trust: a bank, a lawyer, even ASIC [the Australian Securities and Investments Commission] or Australia Post. The crime is proliferating all over the globe. It’s extremely lucrative and rarely prosecuted.”
This was the case for Clifford, who says that she and her husband had no idea that the payment instructions they were emailed by their solicitor, using the same email chain they’d previously communicated on, had been intercepted by a criminal group.
People feel silly, and because the authorities, police, regulators and banks continue to blame them, the cycle continues.
Alex Brooks, Scam Victim Alliance“We didn’t know that real estate agents and lawyers’ emails are widely hacked by financial criminals and organised crime rings who sell these details and work with money mules to commit sophisticated property frauds,” says Clifford. “It was only after the crime that we discovered these real estate frauds are committed across the country, targeting businesses that don’t keep their cybersecurity as up to date as they should.”
But victims of fraud aren’t just impacted financially; shame and trauma can also arise from the experience. “People feel silly, and because the authorities, police, regulators and banks continue to blame them, the cycle continues,” says Brooks.
This was something Hope Clifford and her husband experienced. “You can’t help but blame yourself,” she says. “Then the banks and everyone else blame you as well. We spent more than $10,000 on legal fees trying to work out our rights because it’s such a grey area and hardly anyone knows how to help.”
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There is also an unjust stigma that can come with being the victim of fraud. As Brooks points out, “We don’t blame people whose house gets broken into, or whose car gets stolen, but the complexity of this crime means we blame the victim.”
Because of this unfair application of blame, the impact of scams infects other areas of the victims’ lives and can be extremely harmful, with Brooks saying that “complex PTSD is the most common diagnosis our victims tend to experience”.
Clifford’s mental health was significantly impacted not just by the fraud itself but by the two-year legal battle to reclaim the lost money.
“We’ve been told time and time again that it’s our fault, even though we found out later that there were many red flags that should have been picked up by professionals,” she says. “It absolutely brings you down. I now have anxiety and see a psychologist because our trust has been completely broken and our future is not what we thought it would be.”
For Canberra architect Harriet Spring, who was defrauded of $1.6 million, the emotional toll was severe. “I spent three months in a very, very dark place, distraught and suicidal,” she says. “I was humiliated, personally and professionally. And though friends and family were unerringly kind, I carried deep shame.”
Harriet Spring started the Scam Vicitim Alliance after losing $1.6 million.
In 2023, during what Spring describes as one of the hardest periods of her life, she unknowingly transferred the inheritance from the sale of her mother’s home to a scammer posing as a representative of ING bank.
“My sisters and I placed Mum into care, then prepared to sell,” she says. “We spent a year packing up our family home of three generations while juggling jobs and families in cities located three hours away.
“In November 2023, after the house sold, I sought financial advice and was advised to place the $1.6 million proceeds into a fixed-term deposit. I began researching options, unfamiliar with how deposits over $1 million worked. That’s when I was contacted over the phone by someone I thought was an ING rep.”
Spring, who prided herself on her meticulous eye for detail and ability to scrutinise contracts and manage finances, says “George Thompson” from “ING” came across as diligent and professional. “He emailed me convincing ING-branded documents,” says Spring. “I did my due diligence and consulted my sisters: the rate offered was good but not implausible, so we decided to go ahead.
“I was instructed that the money had to be placed into a ‘Client Segregated Allocated’ account with Westpac. Although odd, it sounded plausible for an international online bank and was backed up by convincing documentation. I provided ID, was given Westpac account details in my name, and transferred the funds through my mother’s long-time bank, which missed obvious red flags. On the first of February, 2024, $1.6 million was sent to the scammer’s account.”
Spring says when she discovered she had been the victim of fraud, she felt a mix of emotions. “My first instinct was that this would all prove to be nothing, and it would be okay, that this couldn’t possibly have happened. But then I contacted ING and they had no record of the account or the ING rep. They told me, ‘If it sounds too good to be true …’ It began to sink in.”
Spring says she felt an initial sense of hope, a belief the bank would trace the money and get it back. But this was not the case, with not just the bank but also other organisations she thought would provide support failing to help. The amount stolen, for example, was greater than the limit (a little over $1 million) that would have allowed it to be investigated by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority.
“Nobody cared – not the government, not the police, not the complaint regulators, and least of all the banks,” says Spring. “Because our loss was so great, we exceeded the thresholds for help, and all we have against the banks’ deep pockets are legal options – hardly a fair fight.”
On top of her family’s money being stolen, imagining the uses it might be put to were devastating. “It crushed me that our stolen money was now funding terrorism, human trafficking and other nefarious acts. Telling my sisters – I called or drove to see all four, one by one – utterly destroyed me.”
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While Spring’s money is gone, she has turned her experience into something positive, co-founding
a not-for-profit organisation, the Scam Victim Alliance. “We try to work alongside government, regulators and law enforcement to provide a different kind of victim support and help end the scourge of scam fraud crime,” she says. “I can personally attest that taking positive action on the back of a heinous crime dramatically helps your healing journey.”
Two years on, thanks to Hope and Tom Clifford’s perseverance, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority forced their bank, NAB, to repay 70 per cent of the couple’s loss.
“We got what’s called a panel determination, and it was an extremely gruelling process,” says Hope Clifford. “But it does mean we’ve created a precedent for other home-buyer fraud victims, which is the only highlight of what we’ve been through. We hope no one else has to be blamed and shamed and humiliated like we have.”
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