Kylee Dennis had spoken to her mother about the “Hi Mum” scam.
But when the former police officer, who now runs her own scams investigation business, got out of her pool in December 2024 and found three missed calls from her mum on her phone, her heart sank.
“She received a text that says ‘hi mum, I’ve accidentally dropped my phone in the sink while cleaning up. It’s completely dead, this is my new number,'” Ms Dennis said.
She said the text went on to say she urgently needed $4,750 to pay a bill but could not access her bank account and asked her to pay it for her.
Ms Dennis said her mother tried to call her but she did not hear the phone ringing because she was swimming.
In the meantime, the scammer was putting pressure on her mother to send the money, but the transaction was being repeatedly rejected by her bank because of a $1,000 transfer limit.
“She just said ‘I looked at that text message and then the next text message seemed that it was so important that I didn’t think twice’,” Ms Dennis said.
“Her heart took over versus her head.”
Ms Dennis said she got out of the pool at a crucial moment in the scam, calling her mother back just as she was about to transfer the first of what would have been four $1,000 payments.
“I had spoken to her about ‘Hi, Mum’ but sort of in an off-the-cuff moment … nothing specific about it which, in hindsight, I should have been more ‘Mum, you need to understand that this does happen’,” she said.
“People aren’t stupid. It’s just scammers’ tactics are so manipulative and coercive that people will comply, so we have to go back to you need to make those phone calls, you need to ring, you need to step away from that phone and think logically about what is being said to you.”
Emotions trump logic when it comes to children, expert says
Three years on from when “Hi Mum” texts first started appearing on mobile phones, Australians are still falling for this emotive scam.
It involves scammers pretending to be a family member or a friend who has lost or damaged their phone — or has some other reason for why the message is coming from an unknown number — and they urgently need to be sent money.
While figures from the federal government’s National Anti-Scam Centre show “Hi Mum” texts are just a small fraction of all phishing scams, reports to one cyber support charity appeared to be on the rise.
IDCARE received 238 calls about the scam in 2024 — a 37.5 per cent increase on the 173 reports the previous year.
National manager of outreach and engagement, Kathy Sundstrom, said 64 cases had already been reported this year.
“We’re only nearly four months in and it looks like we might even exceed that figure again this year,” she said.
Ms Sundstrom said the scam was mostly being run by organised crime gangs based in other countries.
She said most scammers changed their methods over time as fewer victims were falling for their tricks, but “Hi Mum” continued to be a successful lure, particularly for parents who think they’re receiving a desperate message from their child.
“Scammers always try and play with emotions. Emotions are what we react to,” Ms Sundstrom said.
“We want to help our kids so when that message comes through, we might not look at it closely and we might think it is our kid needing help, and then we reach out.”
She said scammers predominantly targeted mothers but had widened their net to include “Hi Dad”, “Hi Sister” and “Hi Aunt” texts, and there was even one report of a scammer pretending to be a priest.
“That’s what they call the ‘spray and pray approach’: so they send them out en masse hoping that a small percentage might have a relationship with their priest, that they will then respond to that kind of messaging.
“Obviously, [the ‘Hi Mum’ scam] is a lot easier because most of us have a mum.”
The elderly not the most susceptible victims
IDCARE runs cybersecurity clinics in conjunction with local councils, Neighbourhood Watch and police.
Its next workshops are in Bendigo and Melbourne next week.
In 2022, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) ran a public awareness campaign when the “Hi Mum” scam peaked, fleecing $7.2 million from 11,100 Australians.
But in an online survey in January by mobile phone provider Vodafone, 44 per cent of the 1,025 respondents said they had not heard of the scam.
Ms Sundstrom said the ACCC’s messaging may be slipping from people’s minds.
She said many people incorrectly thought the elderly were the most likely to fall for the scam.
“Our data constantly shows it’s that 35-to-45-year-old demographic that reports engaging the most, and that’s because they’re the least inclined to go and be looking for this information and interact when they might see a message warning about a particular scam type.
“They’re obviously a lot busier. They’ve got their children, they’ve got their parents to look after, they’ve got their careers.”
How to avoid the ‘Hi Mum’ scam
The National Anti-Scam Centre says scams are constantly evolving and so can be difficult to stay across, but there are steps people could take to try to protect themselves from becoming a victim.
It urges people to never assume that the person who is sending a message from an unknown number is who they say they are, even if they think they may be a family member or a friend.
It says people should always call the person’s existing phone or an alternative contact number that they already had listed for them.
Ms Sundstrom agrees with that advice.
“If you’re getting a text message from your child saying that they dropped their phone in the toilet or can you please pass on this code or do something like that, the best thing you can do is call your child back on the number that you have for them,” she said.
“If it really was dropped in the toilet, they won’t pick up.”
Another tip it provided was to ask a personal question that only the family member would know the answer to.
The National Anti-Scam Centre says an even stronger safeguard is to come up with a safe word or password that your family can use if they do find themselves in an emergency situation and need to contact you on someone else’s phone.
It says a sign that a scammer may be involved is if the sender is applying pressure for a rushed response, including implying that something bad will happen if action isn’t taken quickly.
It urges anyone who receives a scam text message to contact Scamwatch, regardless of whether they lose money or not.
