Bank customers warned on rise of highly sophisticated scammers with $20m drained in 2022

Most people have almost certainly received unsolicated text messages, emails or direct phone calls from scammers claiming to be from banks.

Now there's a major warning from the consumer watchdog that bank impersonation scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated and that crooks are using the latest technology to trick victims into handing over private personal information - which saw one man allow half a million dollars to be drained from his bank account.

To get an idea of just how convincing these scams are - take a listen to this excerpt from a call intercepted by Westpac when a customer was almost conned by a very realistic call before realising it was probably a scam.

Here's my report on the ABC's The World Today and later on ABC Newsradio