News Centre

Scammers are pretending they work for the AFP and other law-enforcement agencies to deceive victims into sending them funds from their cryptocurrency accounts, or to share seed phrases – a list of random words used to help recover your account.

It all starts when the scammers submit a false ReportCyber report using victims’ personal information. They then call the victim to advise they have been identified in a data breach – representing themselves as AFP or other police working under Operation Firestorm (a legitimate AFP operation). They then proceed to deceive the victims into transferring cryptocurrency to secure the account.

What to look out for:

• the scammer acts quickly with a phone call and email
• they say they are:
  • a Detective Chief Inspector with the AFP cybercrime unit
  • an AFP police officer working under Operation Firestorm
  • Detective Sergeant Tim Howard
• the police impersonator usually claims to be from the AFP, but they may also try impersonating other police agencies.
• they may try to video call you from a staged ‘AFP office’ or ‘police station’ to make it look legitimate – police will not contact you by video call.

We urge victims to:

• Stop all communication with the scammer.
• Do NOT transfer funds or provide any information relating to their Digital Currency Exchange (DCE) account/wallet.
• Notify their DCE provider immediately if they have transferred funds or provided information relating to their DCE account/wallet.
• report it to police at ReportCyber and include the false ‘ReportCyber’ CIRS number in the report. 

ReportCyber have implemented a one-time password (OTP) function to stop scammers from lodging and validating false reports via victims’ emails. Never provide this OTP to anyone.