Scuppering scammers: Scams Awareness Week 2019

Romantic scams, investment scams, shopping scams or ‘you’ve won a million dollars’ scams - more than 100,000 Australians have reported scams this year.

That’s why we're supporting the ACCC’s annual Scams Awareness Week 2019, which runs from 12-16 August 2019. 

Scams Awareness Week aims to raise awareness and promote education on ways to detect and avoid scams and minimise impact on the community.

At Google, we’re invested in creating safer digital environments where vulnerable members of the community are less likely to fall victim to scams. We have a dedicated help page that identifies all of the scams purporting to be from Google.

We also make the web safer from phishing and malware with our Safe Browsing warnings in Chrome. Each day we find more than 7,500 unsafe sites, so when you click through to an unsafe page using your Chrome browser, we’ll display a warning and encourage you to go elsewhere. We provide this intel to the Stop Badware coalition to help other service providers make the web safer too.

What can you do to help keep your data safe and secure? Take this quick Security Check-Up to review your current Google account settings and check out the five things you can do right now. You can also visit the Google Safety Centre for more advice about staying safe online.

Google works to make our services trustworthy and robust. For example, automatic Gmail spam and phishing filters block 99.9 percent of suspicious or dangerous emails before they reach you and we block billions of bad ads so you’re better protected as you browse the internet.

You’ll see a lot of activity this week raising awareness of online scams through #ScamsWeek19 - a timely reminder of how important it is to review your privacy and security settings and be scam aware!