When people hear that a fraud victim cannot get anywhere, they assume the problem is a missing law — that if we just gave someone the right power, it would be fixed. After twenty-five years inside investigations and integrity work, I have come to think that is only half of it. The bigger problem is that fraud is under-prioritised, and the responsibility for it is scattered across so many bodies that, for an ordinary victim, no one actually owns their matter from start to finish.

The Australian maze

Consider what an individual in Australia faces when serious fraud hits them. There is a National Anti-Scam Centre, stood up in 2023, but it is a coordination and data-sharing hub — it does not investigate a person's loss or recover their money. There is ReportCyber, a national reporting portal, but for most people it is a place a report goes in and a reference number comes out; the matter is referred, not resolved. The Australian Federal Police lead serious organised cybercrime work, but that is aimed at criminal networks and infrastructure, not one victim's transactions. ASIC and AUSTRAC hold formidable powers, but ASIC's are used at its own discretion and AUSTRAC's intelligence is, by design, not available to the person who was defrauded. State police fraud squads exist, but they are stretched, threshold-driven and quickly defeated when the money crosses a border.

Each of these bodies is doing a real job. The trouble is the space between them. No single agency both investigates an individual's loss and gives that person a supervised path to the records needed to trace it. The victim falls into the gap, and the money — often on its way through the laundering chain — keeps moving while everyone waits for someone else to act.

This is not a secret. The Commonwealth is already circling the issue: parliamentary inquiries into money laundering and financial crime, a joint-committee examination of financial abuse, a new Scams Prevention Framework, and a wave of anti-money-laundering reform. The appetite to look at this is there. What is missing is a decision to join it up.

Other countries have chosen to coordinate

The instructive thing is that coordination is a choice, and some places have made it.

In Singapore, the police and the major banks sit together in a single Anti-Scam Command — bank officers working alongside investigators in the same room, with direct lines into the banking system. The result is speed: suspect accounts traced and frozen within hours rather than months, and, in one half-year period, thousands of accounts frozen and tens of millions of dollars held before it disappeared. Nothing about that requires abandoning the rule of law. It requires putting the people who hold the records and the people who hold the authority in the same place.

In the United Kingdom, the response has been built around a coordinating centre and a shift in who carries the loss. The National Economic Crime Centre, housed within the National Crime Agency, exists precisely to direct a multi-agency response to economic crime. Alongside it, a data-sharing partnership now lets major banks share transaction intelligence with the NCA. And from October 2024, payment providers must reimburse most victims of authorised push-payment fraud — up to a cap aligned with the deposit-protection limit, with refunds generally made within five business days and the cost shared between the sending and receiving firms. Reasonable people argue about the detail, but the direction is unmistakable: the system now treats making the victim whole as part of the response, not an afterthought.

I am not suggesting Australia copy any of these wholesale. Our federation, our agencies and our privacy settings are our own. But each example answers the excuse that nothing can be done.

What coordinated action could look like here

The near-term goal is not a grand new institution. It is to take the resources we already have and make them work together for the person who was defrauded — a single, accountable path from "I have been defrauded" to "someone with authority is looking, and here is who." That means agencies that share, refer and accept referrals rather than bouncing victims between portals; a supervised way for a victim to reach the records of their own money; and, when a matter is handed on, a victim who is told in writing which body now holds it.

Over the longer term, the logical destination is a single coordinating body — an independent national fraud, cyberfraud and financial crime agency — that carries the measurement, the coordination and the victim-facing function in one place. That is the larger reform, and it is worth arguing for. But it is not the first step.

The ask

The first step is modest, and it is winnable: the Commonwealth should examine this properly. A parliamentary inquiry into how fraud victims access information and how our agencies coordinate would put the fragmentation on the record, hear from the people living it, and test what a joined-up Australian response could look like.

Fraud does not get ignored because anyone decided it should. It gets ignored because no one owns it. That is a fixable problem, and other countries are proof. We should get on with fixing ours.

Commentary by Daniel Baulch, written in a personal capacity.