The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) published an enforcement and regulatory update announcing it is expanding its investment scam website takedown capability to cover social media advertisements, aiming to disrupt scam traffic before consumers are directed to fraudulent investment sites. ASIC also reported that more than 14,000 investment scam and phishing websites have been removed since the capability began two years ago, with around 130 malicious sites taken down each week on average. Between 1 July 2023 and 30 June 2025, the coordinated removals included around 8,330 fake investment platform scams, 2,465 phishing scam hyperlinks and 3,015 cryptocurrency investment scams, alongside other online advertisements. ASIC also highlighted five recent scam trends observed through its takedown work: “AI washing” claims about trading bots and returns, rapid deployment using scam website templates and fake documents, embedding legitimate-looking third-party tools such as live charts and chatbots, fake news pages using AI-generated public figure content to harvest leads, and “cloaking” to vary content by user location and device. The update reiterated that investment scams remain the leading scam type by losses, with the National Anti-Scam Centre reporting AUD 945 million lost in 2024, while overall scam losses were 25.9% lower than in 2022 when total losses peaked at AUD 3.1 billion.

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