Before the numbers, a test
Three real-style messages. For each one, decide: scam, or legitimate? Answer honestly, as if you'd received them on your own phone.
No spelling mistakes, no link, no aggressive urgency — just affection and a small logistical hiccup. This is the exact format of the "family emergency" or "hi mum/dad" scam: a new number, a plausible money request, an appeal to family trust rather than fear. There's nothing to "spot" in the classic sense — that's what makes it dangerous.
The trap is in one tiny detail, easy to miss on a phone screen: the domain isn't linkt.com.au. Linkt has officially removed clickable links from its SMS entirely — a link alone means it's fake, no matter how close the domain looks to the real one. Security researchers tracked more than 79,000 fake toll texts like this one sent to Australians since December 2025.
This one is real — major Australian banks do send fraud-confirmation texts in exactly this format, and this one explicitly states it will never ask for a PIN or password. After two traps, suspicion pushes toward rejecting everything — that doesn't work either. Neither blind trust nor blanket suspicion is reliable. That's the whole problem.
Here, you were warned, calm, on a page that told you a test was coming. The real message arrives on a Tuesday at 6pm, while you're doing something else, and it never announces itself.
"My bank will cover it anyway"
That's the most common assumption — and it's only partly true in Australia today. The Scams Prevention Framework Act 2025 places new obligations on banks, telcos and platforms, but full obligations don't land until 31 March 2027. Today, reimbursement for a scam you were tricked into authorising yourself is decided case-by-case by your bank — see what CBA, Westpac, NAB and ANZ actually offer and what really happens after you report one.
The face-off
Egidio's price
Cost of a scam
The fear podium
Records nobody wants to hold — and the people who ended up holding them never wanted to either.
The dollar amount isn't the point. The point is that every one of these people assumed, the day before, that this only happened to someone else.
The math, laid out
We take the sturdiest figure available — an official average, not an extreme case — and let it speak.
Years of protection
A single average scam loss, at the calculated average of $7,940, represents:
$7,940 ÷ $49.99 (annual subscription)The percentage, inverted
Seen another way: the annual subscription represents
$49.99 ÷ $7,940 × 100Protection for the whole family, for the price of a coffee
$99.99 a year for 4 people works out to about $8.33 a month for the whole family ($99.99 ÷ 12) — less than a coffee a month, split four ways.
To compare on a daily basis: the annual plan works out to about 13.7 cents a day (49.99 ÷ 365).
Frequently asked questions
How much does Egidio cost?
$49.99 AUD per year, $99.99 AUD per year for
Family mode (up to 4 people), or $149.99 AUD as a one-time Lifetime payment (promo price,
normally $249.99). A $8.99 AUD/month plan is also available.
What is the average cost of a scam in Australia?
Australians reported
$2.18 billion in total scam losses in 2025, across 274,577 reports involving a financial loss.
The median loss was $400, but averaged across all loss-making reports the figure works out to
roughly $7,940 per report.
How many people does Family mode cover?
4 people under a single
subscription, for $99.99 AUD per year. How Family mode works →