Fraud Awareness Campaigns

The annual campaign run by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs to highlight mass-marketed scams.

About the Fraud Awareness Campaigns

As part of a trans-Tasman approach to combat consumer fraud and scams targeted at consumers, the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce was established in March 2005 and comprised 18 government regulatory agencies and departments in Australia and New Zealand.

Agencies participating in the Taskforce

New Zealand Government: Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Commerce Commission.

Australian Government: Attorney General’s Department; Australian Bureau of Statistics; Australian Communications and Media Authority; Australian Competition & Consumer Commission; Australian Federal Police (represented by the Australian High Tech Crime Centre; Australian Institute of Criminology; Australian Securities & Investment Commission; Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts
State and Territory Governments: Australian Capital Territory – Office of Fair Trading; Consumer Affairs Victoria; New South Wales – Office of Fair Trading; Northern Territory – Department of Justice; Queensland – Department of Tourism, Fair Trading and Wine Industry Development; South Australia – Office of Consumer & Business Affairs; Tasmania – Office of Consumer Affairs & Fair Trading; Western Australia – Department of Consumer & Employment Protection.

Objective

The main objective for Fraud Awareness campaigns are to raise awareness and provide information to New Zealanders on:

how to spot scams
how to avoid being scammed, and
how to report a scam (via this Scamwatch website)

Fraud Awareness Week 2010

The New Zealand campaign, Fraud Awareness Week 2010, ran for one week from the 1 – 7 March, mirroring the dates of the Australian campaign.Fraud Awareness Week 2010 encouraged the involvement and action of a number of stakeholder organisations (public, private and community agencies) to raise awareness of fraud and scams amongst New Zealanders.

Fraud Awareness Week 2010 followed on from promotions in earlier years with the established focus on empowering consumers to recognise and respond appropriately to scams.

The 2010 campaign focussed on the promotion of NetSafe's Scam Machine - an interactive video-making website. The scam machine allows users to build a news story based around someone they know, putting them at the centre of an online scam story.

Visit NetSafe's Scam Machine.

Fraud Awareness Week 2009

Fraud Awareness Week 2009 again aimed to raise New Zealander’s awareness about how to spot scams and report a scam to Scamwatch.

Resources developed for use during the campaign included:

Leaflets
Posters
Brochure

A well-attended launch event was held at Trade Me’s offices and 36 media articles were generated as a result. The campaign focussed on four scam victim’s stories (portrayed by actors but telling genuine scam reports to Scamwatch). Research suggests that people learn from others’ stories.

Fraud Awareness Week 2008

Fraud Awareness Week 2008 aimed to raise New Zealander’s awareness about how they could spot scams, protect themselves from scams, and report a scam to help protect others.

Fraud Awareness Week 2008 focused on scams that seduce consumers with promises of easy money, great prizes or true love and deceive or trick consumers into giving scammers their personal details.

The key messages for Fraud Awareness Week 2008 were very simple:

Scams target you. Protect yourself.
Don’t be seduced. Don’t be deceived.
Fight the scammers! Don't respond!
If it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Most scams originate from outside New Zealand and once money is sent overseas it is virtually impossible to recover.

But New Zealanders can fight scammers, simply by not responding to a scam attempt.

By responding you let the scammer know you are there. If you don’t respond they don’t know you exist and they can’t take your money.

Fraud Awareness Month 2007

The second Fraud Awareness Month took place in 2007. The campaign ran from 5th March 2007, through to the end of March.

The core campaign involved resource development, public relations aimed at encouraging media coverage, stakeholder engagement aimed at encouraging awareness raising activities and a paid advertising campaign.

A number of organisations also ran their own initiatives during the month.

The key messages of the campaign were backed up by directing consumers to SCAMwatch for more information.