Telstra has warned about scammers impersonating it in the wake of last week’s nationwide outage, and with no compensation program announced, any message offering you an outage refund right now is a scam by definition.
The outage itself was last week when a software defect took down services nationally from the early morning, with triple-zero calls affected, before Telstra restored the network the same day. Now there’s a warning about scams in its wake.
Telstra’s own warning, from chief financial officer Michael Ackland, was about impersonation phone calls:
“If you get a call from someone claiming to be Telstra asking you for details in light of today’s outage, please hang up and call us back directly.”
The refund lure is the other version to watch: fake Telstra “billing adjustment” and refund messages are a documented pattern.
The bait is a refund or an account credit tied to the outage.
A text or email says you are owed money for the downtime. It carries a link to claim it. The link goes to a page that looks like Telstra and asks for your bank details, your login, or a one-time code sent to your phone.
Some versions skip the refund and go straight for fear, warning that your account is suspended or your service will be cut unless you act.
Telstra says it will never ask for or provide your password, will never ask you to read back a one-time PIN, and that gift cards are never a legitimate way to pay a bill. General anti-scam guidance from Scamwatch adds cryptocurrency to that list: no real telco bill gets settled in Bitcoin.
Genuine account messages and credits show up inside the My Telstra app, not only in a random SMS with a link attached.
If a message pushes you to move fast or move off official channels, that is the tell.
The red flags
Three signs cover most of these.
- Urgency. A real refund is not going to expire in ten minutes, and Telstra is not going to cut you off tonight because you did not click.
- A payment or login link. Treat any link asking for bank details, passwords or card numbers as hostile until proven otherwise.
- A request for a one-time code. That code is the key to your account or your bank. Nobody legitimate needs you to read it back to them.
- How to check
Do not use the contact details in the message. That’s what the scammers want!
Open the My Telstra app yourself and look for the same offer or alert there. If it is real, it will be in your account. If it is not, it will not.
You can also call Telstra on its published 24×7 line or reach it through the official website you typed in yourself, rather than any number or address the message hands you. That is exactly what Telstra’s own warning asks: hang up, and call back directly.
When the message and the app disagree, believe the app.
Where to report it
Report the message to Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, which sits inside the ACCC.
Reporting is not just tidiness. The National Anti-Scam Centre publishes the running tally of what phone and telco impersonation scams are costing Australians, and those figures come from reports like yours. The current numbers are on the Scamwatch data pages.
On an Android phone, forward scam texts claiming to be Telstra to 7226, which spells SCAM on a keypad, so the telco can act on them. On an iPhone, use the report-junk option instead; Telstra’s scams page at telstra.com.au has the device-specific steps.
This information is general in nature and does not take into account your personal financial situation. It is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. You should consider seeking independent legal, financial, taxation or other advice to check how this information relates to your unique circumstances. Switzer is not responsible for any decisions made on the basis of this information.
