CommBank Adds AI-Powered Scam Detection Tool to Identity Protection App

Australian bank CommBank is adding two new defensive assets designed to help protect its customers from fraud, scams, financial crime and cyber threats.

The launch of these assets builds upon earlier solutions that have helped drive a 76% reduction in customers’ losses to scams since the first half of 2023, when those losses peaked, according to a Monday (Aug. 11) press release.

One new asset is a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered scam detection tool called Scam Checker that is incorporated into the digital identity protection app Truyu, which is built by CommBank’s venture scaling arm x15ventures, according to the release.

The tool allows Truyu users to take a screenshot of a suspicious text, upload it to the app and get instant analysis of whether it is a scam, per the release.

“Scam Checker uses Gen AI and CommBank scams intelligence — it’s a powerful combination,” Truyu Managing Director Melanie Hayden said in the release.

The second new asset deployed by CommBank to combat scams is in the CommBank app and asks customers to verify certain online card transactions before the transaction is authorized, in real time, according to the release.

This asset is designed to combat scams that use fraudulent text messages that impersonate legitimate businesses and try to trick customers into following the message’s instructions, per the release.

“We’re now asking those customers who use the CommBank app to verify some online card transactions directly in the app instead of sending them a code,” CommBank General Manager of Group Fraud James Roberts said in the release. “We are able to give clearer guidance and warnings in the app than in a text message.”

These join CommBank’s earlier solutions that include the launch of Truyu last year and the addition of in-app authentication to the CommBank app earlier the year, according to the release.

CommBank said in June 2023 that it started declining or holding for 24 hours certain payments to cryptocurrency exchanges and would begin limiting customer payments to exchanges for cryptocurrency purchases because of a growing number of scams.

The bank said at the time that scammers had been capitalizing on consumers’ growing interest in cryptocurrencies.