One year ago, five of the largest banks in Australia joined the world’s first real-time financial crime intelligence-sharing network built around analysing patterns in accountholder behaviour. BioCatch Trust™ Australia now protects more than 85% of the nation’s banked population and, in the third quarter of 2025 alone, analysed more than 180 million payments totaling more than $330 billion, revealing more than $60 million in attempted fraud.
“In better than 70% of those transactions, BioCatch Trust reliably retrieved the beneficiary’s account profile, assessing the end-to-end payment risk before any money left the sender’s account,” BioCatch SVP of Emerging Solutions and Network Tim Dalgleish said. “When the network makes that match, its signals now detect better than 70% of social engineering scam payments.”
BioCatch, which prevents financial crime by recognising patterns in human behaviour, published these first publicly available Trust success metrics in a new report, 2025 Digital Banking Fraud Trends in Australia. The report also highlights a decline money laundering activity (20%) among the company’s Australian customers.
“We do see account takeover attempts in Australia increasing by 47% in the last year and more than doubling in the last six months,” BioCatch Director of Global Fraud Intelligence Thomas Peacock said. “We can attribute this in large part to coordinated attacks from organised criminal groups.”
“Southeast Asia is home to a vast network of scam compounds, which serve as the launchpads for much of the online fraud targeting Australians,” said Emerald Sage, principal intelligence advisor at OSINT Combine. “These compounds are not fringe criminal enclaves but entrenched infrastructures that exploit governance gaps, regional passivity, and parallel financial systems. Their integration with Chinese organised crime syndicates ensures these compounds are not isolated enterprises but nodes in a wider criminal economy spanning mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Their scale and reach make them a critical threat to global financial integrity.”
The report also features a piece from the head of economic crime at the Australian Payments Network, Toby Evans. Evans makes the case that the recent surge in scams has exposed a critical gap in modern payment systems. He advocates for adding a third principle to Privacy by Design and Security by Design: Safety by Design.
“The digital payments landscape continues to evolve, from AI-driven e-commerce to cross-border links between fast payment systems,” Australian Payments Network Head of Economic Crime Toby Evans said. “Each advance brings new opportunities, but also new risks. By embedding safety into systems from the start, payments can remain innovative, secure, and resilient without forcing consumers to shoulder risk.”
BioCatch Trust recently won awards from Datos and Regulation Asia for best scam-prevention solution, anti-fraud project of the year, and financial crime industry collaboration of the year. Since its launch, two additional financial institutions (including Macquarie Bank) have joined the network.
