Westpac CEO Anthony Miller slams Meta for financial scams, illegal bank account market

Westpac’s chief executive Anthony Miller has slammed Facebook-owner Meta for allowing the illegal sale of bank accounts on the social media platform and for making billions of dollars in profits from adverts that promote financial scams.

Speaking at a parliamentary Economics Committee on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Miller said Meta made a significant shares of its total advertising revenues from financial scams on its platforms, but showed little appetite to clamp down on the problems.

“Meta made $16 billion in ad revenue globally as a a result of ads for what were effectively just scams,” he told lawmakers.

“When we’ve identified a scam through engaging with customers we let the [social] media platforms know, but it’s fair to say the response is not always where we would like it to be, and hence why we think it’s really important that everyone has a [regulatory] code they deliver on.”

In a rapid fire exchange of ideas with parliamentarians, Mr Miller covered a wide range of topics from energy bills to interest rates, surcharging, AI, productivity, house prices, and the challenge of dealing with financial scams on Tuesday.

He said the bank’s Safer Pay program had saved its customers up to $690 million in losses from social media based scams by challenging them online to make sure they’re certain a payment recipient is not a scammer.

“[Customers have] taken an entreaty from a social media platform and they’re going to be scammed if we don’t stop it,” he said.

“It doesn’t mean every single one was a scam, but nevertheless they didn’t pass the test when the customer was challenged... So it just highlights we’ve really got to get the social media platforms participating in this [scam prevention] more.”

Bank accounts for sale on Facebook

Later in the session, Labor member of parliament for Reid, Sally Sitou, pushed Mr Miller on the problem of ‘mule’ bank accounts offered for sale on Facebook.

The mule account nickname refers to the idea of a money mule, used to transfer illicit proceeds of crime. Criminals often buy them on social media after they’re advertised for sale by temporary migrants such as students.

“If you go on, dare I say it Facebook, and look up bank accounts for sale...you’ll see the bank’s name, and the cost of that bank account,” said Mr Miller.

“So that’s an illegal activity, yet it’s allowed to prosper and when that bank account gets sold and we don’t know there’s a change, but it’s now owned by a criminal.”

Mr Miller added that it was important the banking industry worked with regulators to share patterns in relation to preventing money laundering and knowing the true identity of a customer.

Earlier in the day, Matt Comyn the chief executive of Australia’s largest lender the Commonwealth Bank also criticised US tech companies for providing platforms for financial crime and scams.

Mr Comyn said CBA was proud to spend $1 billion a year fighting financial scams to help protect its customers from online crooks.

In total, he estimated the bank’s fraud prevention systems save customers at least $100 million a year in losses from scams. “Every 24 hours our customers require us to process 21 million payments,” he said.

“We try to assess each one to predict whether they may be subject to scams, fraudulent or look suspicious.”

CBA shares closed down 1.7 per cent to $153.22 on Tuesday afternoon and have now tumbled 11.3 per cent over the past month to erase all their gains over 2025.

Amid a broad share markett sell-off, Westpac shares closed down 3 per cent to $37.87, but have still climbed 16.9 per cent year to date.