Australia politics live: ATO complaints more than double; WhatsApp could be included in under-16s social media ban

Scams come in all shapes and sizes (and none of them are nice), and the government is considering creating rules that would force banks, telcos and digital platforms to automatically reimburse victims of smaller scams of up to $3,000.

Labor is considering a range of options as part of a scam protection framework.

The financial services minister, Daniel Mulino, is out and about this morning spruiking the idea.

He tells the ABC’s AM program it would mean that banks and telcos would focus their dispute resolution processes on bigger scams.

double quotation markFor smaller losses, $3,000 and under, what we’re proposing is that there should be automatic payment to consumers where they can verify that there has been a scam.

Scams that get into the six figures: some investment scams, some romance scams. And that’s where dispute resolution processes would come into play.

Host Melissa Clark asks why the automatic payment threshold isn’t higher – she says other countries like the UK have theirs set closer to £48,000. Mulino says the government doesn’t want to incentivise bigger scams.

double quotation markWhat we want to do is to make sure that we don’t have the wrong incentives for perpetrators to see Australia as a soft target. But the balance is that with very small claims we don’t want to have processes that are completely disproportionate to the value of the sum in dispute.