The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is stepping up its action to protect consumers from online investment scams.

ASIC’s investment scam website takedown capability is being expanded to include social media ads in an escalation of the agency’s fight to protect Australians.

ASIC’s latest Enforcement and regulatory update, released today, also reveals more than 14,000 investment scam and phishing websites have been knocked out since the takedown capability began two years ago. ASIC continues to remove an average of 130 malicious sites every week.

The regulator has also released the top five online investment scam trends it identified through its website takedown work in the last six months:

• AI washing: Scammers claim their fake trading bots use AI to generate passive income and unachievable returns.
• Scam website templates: Scammers use slick templates, fake corporate documents and chatbot plugins to launch convincing copy-cat scam websites quickly.
• Taking advantage of third parties: Scammers embed legitimate-looking third-party content like live trading charts and chatbots to make their fake sites seem credible.
• Fake news articles: Scammers create fake news pages with AI-generated celebrity and prominent Australians fakes to collect contact info and pitch their scams.
• Cloaking: Scammers change the content displayed on the website depending on the location of the target audience and device type.

ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court said expanding the takedown service to social media ads would help stop more scammers directing consumers to online investment scam sites.

‘Expanding our investment scam takedown capability to social media ads will help safeguard Australian consumers. ASIC’s traditional toolkit – investigations, court actions, administrative actions – are important, but they can’t combat the scourge of online scams on their own.

The takedown capability is one example of how we are monitoring the latest trends and acting to protect Australians from those who try to steal from them”.

Investment scams remain the leading type of scam impacting Australians in terms of losses. According to the National Anti-Scam Centre, Australians lost $945 million to these types of scams in 2024.

Scammers continue to evolve their tactics and are using the latest technology to dupe Australians, which is why consumers must remain vigilant. While overall scam losses have fallen 25.9% compared with 2022, when total scam losses peaked at $3.1 billion, there is still more work to do.