There’s a bank ledger in Westpac’s archives with page after page of neat copper-plate records of small-town deposits and withdrawals, until you get to the page for February 8, 1879, where there is a large tea stain.

 

Kim Eberhard, Westpac’s head of historical services, says the momentary lapse is understandable.

 

“Ned Kelly - and everything that comes with Ned - is standing right in front of him,” she says of the young clerk in the NSW town of Jerilderie who was taking a tea-break when the Kelly gang arrived to steal more than £2000 and burn the documents they found in the safe.

 

The history of bank robberies and fraud holds a dark mirror to the technology we use to protect our assets. In Australia’s lawless early years, the target was physical cash stored at isolated branches. The weapon of choice was a gun.

 

“One of the very first things that we acquired when we set up the bank in 1817 was a blunderbuss, and it had to be specially imported from England,” says Eberhard of the Bank of New South Wales, which became Westpac in 1982.

 

The gun was a declaration of intent as much as a practical deterrent. “It set the tone for the way that we would try and protect not just our assets but also the assets of our customers,” Eberhard says.

 

It was also, she says, a hard habit to break. The bank was still issuing guns to its managers right up to the early 1980s. “They used to have to go up on to the roof of our headquarters building on George Street (in Sydney) and hit a target on a wall to prove they could shoot,” says Eberhard.

 

By the 1980s, most villains had moved on, replacing violence and brute force with the con. More police, better communications and less physical cash stored on the premises had swung the balance away from men with guns to white-collar criminals who hit the process rather than the vault. Forged signatures, stolen cheques and falsified promissory notes became their stock-in-trade.

 

When electronic book keeping and fast reconciliation made cheque fraud harder, the criminals moved on to credit card fraud. When ATMs appeared, they designed skimmers and hidden cameras to steal PINs.

Ben Young, Westpac’s current head of fraud prevention, is on the frontline in the increasingly sophisticated battle against fraudsters. “Fraud and security has changed a lot in the last few years,” he says.

 

“We’ve seen the rise of deep fakes and bots and high volume SMSs and cryptocurrency.

 

“But believe it or not, our fraud and scam numbers have actually come down in the last few years because we’ve also made huge investments in our technology.

 

“When you stand at an ATM, or you tap your card at the jewellers, or you log in to try and pay someone $15,000… Even though all of those banking moments feel like they occur in real time, the bank is making an awful lot of assessments about that payment: not just which card is it, and is it the right card, but also, behaviourally, does this feel right and does it match against this customer’s history?” he says.

 

“Banks are very good at learning from others’ mistakes,” he adds.

 

“It’s a real community of the good guys working together to keep the bad guys out.”

 

Scammers have the biggest impact targeting Australians and businesses, with reports people lost $2.2bn to scams last year - including $840m to investment scams.

 

“The No 1 problem is investment scams - some of them are amazingly sophisticated these days,” he says. “The domestic impersonation scam is very, very common and will trap even people who think of themselves as very conservative investors.”

 

People tend to place too much trust in their instincts, Young says.

 

“We have at least one victim a day who will say to us ‘He had this very posh English accent’ or ‘The font looked very professional on the website’.

 

“There’s a point where people’s ability to do due diligence on an investment runs into things that don’t make sense.”

 

Young has three recommendations.

 

“First, take your time. Trying to rush you into something is at the heart of a lot of the scams.

 

"Second: don’t ever lie to your bank. There are so many scams out there where the scammers’ main message is that your bank is working against you. Anyone who ever tells you to lie to the bank is trying to steal your money, pure and simple.

 

"And third, just read any messages or pop ups. If we’re putting it there, it’s for a very good reason. So please read it and respond to it accordingly; it allows the bank and the customer to work together to find all the frauds and scams that are out there,” he says.