Cyber scams stealing from first-home buyers

International organised crime gangs are targetting young Australian home buyers with sophisticated cyber scams that see their hard-earned deposits and settlement payments diverted to offshore accounts.

And as younger home buyers face an increasingly expensive property market, cyber-enabled home buyer fraudsters are lurking, ready waiting to rip them off through cloned emails and fake bank accounts, possibly crippling them financially for the rest of their lives.

It’s bad enough for first-time home purchasers that it takes roughly nine or ten times the average household incomes to buy somewhere to live.

But they are being identified as soft targets for cyber-scammers who use ‘payment redirection’ – or business email compromise as it’s also known – to divert the most money they have ever owned into mule bank accounts that funnel money overseas through crypto or digital foreign currency exchanges – never to be seen again.

The way it often works is that just when a home buyer is about to make their payment, they receive an email purporting to be from a trusted source, like Pexa or their solicitor, with a link to what’s known as a mule bank account. The unsuspecting home buyer approves the online transaction and the money simply disappears within hours – usually to an offshore bank account or a multitude of other Australian mule bank accounts – from which it can’t be retrieved.

Payment redirection losses have shot up 66% to more than $152 million in the last year, even while overall losses from other scams have come down. It is now the third-largest source of defrauded funds after investment and romance scams, both of which have gone down considerably in the past year.

Buying a home has never been harder for young people. New Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released this week show the combined value of all residential Australian houses and apartments – something called the ‘median dwelling price’ – has crossed the million-dollar threshold to $1,002,500.

And, attracted by the large sums changing hands, cyber-enabled scams have evolved to trick first-time purchasers into transferring funds for settlement into the wrong bank account.

As a result, these online cons deliver outsized harm to Australia compared to other countries. The average scam loss per capita in Australia last year was more than double that for Great Britain and a third more than the United States. Meanwhile, total Australian losses from other scams have come down from 2023.

$109k paid to fake Pexa account

My own son – Louis May – paid $365,000 to buy a rundown strata apartment in western Sydney that we knew had a whopping $60,000 strata levy coming (hence the bargain price!), writes Alexandra Brooks.

Now plenty of people – including his bank and the Australian Financial Complaints Authority – blame the victim for being tricked into believing he needed to transfer $109,350 to a fake PEXA account.

And, yes, he could have been more careful, but the fake PEXA form landed in his email 30 minutes after speaking with his solicitor about settlement and how much he needed to pay PEXA, the digital clearing house that handles most property settlements now that bank cheques are a thing of the past.

I was so shocked that this was a known scam type that I created a video podcast about the whole thing.

I thought this must be a rare and sophisticated scam, but imagine my surprise when my other son’s girlfriend said the same thing happened to her cousin, Jessica Greentree, when she bought her first house on the outskirts of Sydney with that magical million dollar price tag. 

That’s when I realised younger people aren’t just frivolously wasting their money on avocado toast and staying out of the real estate market – there are some serious financial barriers to entry and increased risks when they do save enough money to get their first property.

Email and invoice payment redirection scams – a complicated twist on the regular phishing emails most of us see in our inboxes – are common, and Australian banks do not refund the scammed money as the ePayments Code means people transferring money online accept all liability for fraud, even though they are victims of crime.

In the Daylight Robbery podcast, I have interviewed other home buyer fraud victims, lawyers, finance experts and cybercrime forensic investigators to unpick how and why Australia has become a target for such crimes.

Hint: it’s because our property prices are the second most expensive in the world after Hong Kong, and any transnational crime organisation worth their salt is trying to get a slice of the misdirected payments for their own ill-gotten gain.

How expensive and therfore lucrative is our property market? Canstar have released a new analysis that shows the income required to buy a median-priced apartment in Australian capital cities has also shot up.

It means the typical first home dream of a modest house with a backyard is now out of reach for most people, and even purchasing apartments requires a hefty 20% deposit and healthy salary. The federal government’s expanded 5% deposit scheme could go a long way to helping first home buyers.

In 2020, buyers could manage repayments on a median-priced home with a modest income and low interest rates. But in 2025, the required income has soared – pricing out many younger and first-time buyers.

How much you need to earn to afford a unit

People living in Sydney need to earn the most ($177,699) to avoid mortgage stress while those in Darwin need to earn the least ($76,586).

City	Median apartment value	20% deposit	Monthly mortgage repayment	Average before-tax annual income	Before-tax income required to avoid mortgage stress	Difference
Sydney	$844,659	$168,932	$4,441	$98,353	$177,699	-$79,346
Melbourne	$613,023	$122,605	$3,223	$96,621	$128,963	-$32,342
Brisbane	$600,215	$120,043	$3,156	$95,924	$126,282	-$30,358
Adelaide	$514,369	$102,874	$2,705	$90,241	$108,236	-$17,995
Perth	$508,988	$101,798	$2,676	$109,600	$107,076	$2,524
Hobart	$528,625	$105,725	$2,780	$86,840	$111,237	-$24,397
Darwin	$364,075	$72,815	$1,914	$95,306	$76,586	$18,720
Canberra	$592,879	$118,576	$3,117	$108,555	$124,722	-$16,167
Combined capitals	$664,596	$132,919	$3,495	$98,218	$139,847	-$41,629

Canstar’s data shows how much you need to earn to be able to afford the repayments on a unit in each capital city without suffering mortgage stress. This is based on the median unit value and assumes you have a 20% deposit and that your annual mortgage repayments make up 29.99% of before-tax income.

Roy Morgan research shows 26.5% of Australians with a mortgage were at risk of mortgage stress in the three months to April 2025.