Victoria has been named Australia’s cybercrime capital, and an expert says it’s ‘your own fault’ if you’re duped

Victorians are being warned to take more care to avoid cybercrime, as it is revealed the state is the nation’s cybercrime capital.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre has received more than 13,500 reports of cybercrime since July, with 26 per cent of those reports coming from Victoria.

But Nigel Phair, Director of the University of NSW’s Canberra Cyber, says the scale of the problem is much worse than in appears.

“This is a really under-reported crime,” he told 3AW’s Ross and John.

Mr Phair urged Victorians to take more care.

“It is largely your own fault because you’ve done something, usually, which is pretty silly,” he said.

“It’s usually an email, clicking on a link, a telephone call getting you to do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do, or an SMS … where it wants you to click on a link.

“We fall for it all the time as Australians, we get greedy and we want to believe that we’re going to win that £12 million from the Nigerian prince.”

Mr Phair said fraud is the most common type of cybercrime.

“The most common cybercrime being reported, particularly by individuals, relates to fraud, specifically when you get that telephone call that says ‘I’m from the NBN, or I’m from Telstra, let me take over your computer’, and it ends up being ransomware,” he said.

Fraudsters are increasingly turning to smaller, more frequent scams to dupe people.

“Fraudsters can be amazingly rational when they need to be, and they know that if they keep the value low and the volume high they can still make the same amount of money they would have ordinarily,” Mr Phair said.

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