AFP and ACCC Sign New Scam MOU. Compliance Teams Need the Same Upgrade.

16^th Sep 2026 By Jade Locke - Global Demand Generation Manager

On 15 September 2026, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) to strengthen how the two agencies share information and coordinate against scams. The MOU builds a formal framework to help the AFP and the ACCC-managed National Anti-Scam Centre identify emerging scam trends, disrupt criminal activity, and support enforcement action, extending work already underway through the AFP-led Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre (JPC3).

The timing makes its own case. Australians reported losing about $2.18 billion to scams in 2025, a 7.8 percent increase on the year before, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams Report. The report’s own assessment was blunt: scams are a “wicked problem,” complex, fast-evolving, and resistant to simple solutions.

TWO AGENCIES SHARING INTELLIGENCE FASTER STILL LEAVES A GAP

Closer coordination between the AFP and the ACCC will help disrupt scam networks at a national level. That is genuinely good news, and it builds on the reporting network Scamwatch already runs.

But it solves a government-to-government problem, not the one sitting inside a due diligence, compliance, or fraud team right now.

That problem looks something like this. A check comes back clean. The file closes. Everyone moves on. Weeks or months later, the same entity, the same director, the same digital footprint resurfaces as part of something much bigger: a scam network, a fraud ring, a sanctioned party operating under a new name. The point-in-time check was not wrong when it ran. It just could not see what had not surfaced yet, and it stopped looking the moment the file closed.

WHY STATIC CHECKS MISS FAST-MOVING SCAM NETWORKS?

Financial institutions and corporates are accustomed to detecting risk through structure. Sanctions programs define entities. PEP lists identify exposure. Adverse media provides narrative signals that can be linked to names.

Scam and fraud networks rarely present themselves so neatly. They now operate across borders, spin up new entities and digital personas faster than manual reviews can track, and leave their clearest warning signs in places static checks were never built to look: social media, marketplace listings, adverse media, and dark web chatter.

A customer can pass every traditional screening control, no sanctions hit, no negative media profile, and still be part of a network enabling scam activity. The signals are present. They are just distributed across actors, jurisdictions, and open-source environments that do not naturally converge in a single screening workflow.

THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM

The National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams Report recorded 481,523 combined scam reports in 2025, of which 274,577 involved a financial loss. The top five scam types by loss were:

• Investment scams: $837.7 million
• Payment redirection scams: $166.8 million
• Romance scams: $139.9 million
• Phishing scams: $97.6 million
• Remote access scams: $69.9 million

Those five categories alone accounted for 60 percent of total losses. Every one of them depends on an entity, a persona, or a network that a traditional, point-in-time check was never designed to see coming.

WHO THIS AFFECTS?

This is not only a law enforcement problem. It sits squarely with the teams responsible for compliance, financial crime, fraud, security, hiring, procurement, and due diligence – the people accountable for making confident decisions with an incomplete picture of risk.

SOMETHING IS CHANGING IN DUE DILIGENCE

Fivecast has spent years turning open-source data into intelligence for the investigators, agencies, and analysts who can least afford to miss a signal.

We are bringing that same capability to due diligence. The future of due diligence is here, closing the gap between traditional screening and online intelligence.

AN INTELLIGENCE SHIFT IS ALREADY UNDERWAY

The AFP-ACCC MOU is a strong signal that government sees intelligence sharing and cross-agency collaboration as central to disrupting scams at scale. Organizations exposed to the same criminal networks, through onboarding, claims, investment flows, or third-party relationships, need that same principle applied inside their own walls: connected, current, evidence-based intelligence, not a static check run once and forgotten.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did the AFP and ACCC just announce?
The AFP and the ACCC signed a new memorandum of understanding to share scam intelligence faster, helping the two agencies identify emerging scam trends, disrupt criminal networks, and support enforcement action.

How much are Australians losing to scams?
Australians reported losing about $2.18 billion to scams in 2025, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams Report, an increase of 7.8 percent on 2024.

Does the AFP-ACCC MOU affect due diligence and compliance teams outside law enforcement?
Not directly. The MOU governs information sharing between the AFP and the ACCC. It does not change the tools or data available to corporate due diligence, financial crime, or compliance teams, who still rely on their own screening processes to identify risk.

What is the National Anti-Scam Centre?
The National Anti-Scam Centre is run by the ACCC and brings together government, law enforcement, and the private sector to identify, disrupt, and warn Australians about scams.

How can due diligence teams keep up with fast-moving scam and fraud networks?
By extending traditional screening with continuous, open-source intelligence that can surface digital footprints, hidden relationships, and emerging entities before they become a loss. Fivecast is building exactly that for due diligence teams.

Sources: Australian Federal Police, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, National Anti-Scam Centre.

ABOUT FIVECAST

Fivecast delivers open-source intelligence solutions built for clarity, powered by AI, and trusted to surface what matters. Engineered to solve complex intelligence challenges, our platform cuts through digital noise across the surface, deep web, and dark web to help those protecting nations, borders, businesses, and communities uncover critical insights before risk becomes reality.

Trusted by agencies and enterprises across national security, law enforcement, defense, corporate security, and financial crime, Fivecast was born from collaboration between government and research institutions. Headquartered in Australia with a global footprint, we support the world’s most critical missions.

Fivecast. Engineered for Intelligence.

Find out why agencies and enterprises around the world rely on Fivecast to deliver results.