Will the new scam laws stop scam calls reaching your phone?

Updated 3 November 2026 with the latest figures.

Ian Odlum's phone rang in Perth. The caller claimed to be from the police and told him to report to Narrogin Police Station, about 200 kilometres away. He refused, and the caller hung up.

Vodafone's fraud team counted more than 2,400 fake police calls like his in one week in September, the ABC reported on 22 October. Vodafone's owner, TPG Telecom, says over 24 million scam calls hit its network in the year to July 2026. It says 98% came through one carrier: Symbio, a wholesaler owned by Aussie Broadband.

From 31 March 2027, the Scams Prevention Framework puts legal duties on telcos for the first time. Scams cost Australians $2.18 billion in 2025, on the National Anti-Scam Centre's combined count. So will the new rules make the ringing stop?

No, but fewer scam calls should get through. Reported phone scam losses fell by a third in 2025 as blocking grew, and the new code targets the carriers that sell numbers to scammers.

Confidence: Likely (fewer calls), Very unlikely (no calls). Three parts to this: what blocking already does, the leak the law aims at, and where scammers go next.

Telcos blocked 492.7 million scam calls in 2025, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre's annual report. Since the industry's scam call code began in December 2020, ACMA counts about 2.9 billion blocked calls to March 2026.

The losses showed it. Australians reported losing $72.5 million to phone scams through Scamwatch in 2025, down from $107.2 million in 2024. That is a fall of 32.4%.

The 2026 numbers look less rosy. Scamwatch has logged more than 33,300 phone scam reports and $61.1 million in phone losses so far in 2026, Information Age reported on 27 October. That is already 84% of the 2025 total, with about two months still to count.

Phone calls still hurt the people they reach. The median phone scam loss in 2025 was $3,800, more than nine times the $400 median across all scams. One call that lands does real damage, which is why the gaps matter.

Symbio sells blocks of Australian numbers to about 500 business customers, who can resell them to thousands more. That is how Aussie Broadband chief executive Brian Maher explained the problem to the ABC. Cybercrime investigator Dan Halpin says scammers buy blocks of about 100 numbers and swap them when flagged.

The regulator has been here before. In 2022, ACMA formally warned Symbio after it investigated 9 of 777,268 suspect numbers another telco flagged. In 2024 it directed two Symbio companies to follow the rules after late information sharing.

ACMA member Samantha Yorke said the rules "are only as effective as the weakest link". ACMA said it would not hesitate to act harder if breaches continued.

Aussie Broadband has promised a scam review of Symbio's customers, more monitoring technology and a portal to log tracing work, WhistleOut reported. Maher told Information Age that "where we find a persistent bad actor, then we will disconnect them". Under the draft telco code, carriers must check who a customer is, check their right to use a number and stop calls from numbers they have no right to.

Here is the catch. Scamwatch losses to online scams, through websites and social media, rose 21.8% to $158.5 million in 2025. That is more than twice the phone total, and combined losses across all agencies still rose 7.8%.

The drift continued in 2026. Online contact made up about half of all Scamwatch losses in the March quarter, the anti-scam centre said on 5 June. In the first half of 2026, scam reports fell 11% while reported losses rose 1%, Information Age found.

America shows what happens next. Its caller ID check, called STIR/SHAKEN, now signs most calls, but robocallers adapted, a peer-reviewed study at North Carolina State University found. The authors estimate volumes fell 25% to 50%, and enforcement trailed the first calls by an average of 387 days.

Britain moved faster. After Ofcom ordered telcos to block foreign calls faking UK numbers, BT stopped up to one million calls a day in its first month, Which? reported.

The gloomiest case comes from YouMail chief executive Alex Quilici. In 2023 he said American enforcement and caller ID checks had not yet made a material dent, with 4.5 billion robocalls in one month. The NC State team adds that scammers increasingly use real, verified numbers.

He is right that rules push scammers onto cleaner numbers, and the 2026 phone losses fit that worry. But Australian phone scam reports in 2025 sat 73.7% below 2021, the Australian Telecommunications Alliance says in the anti-scam centre's report. Here, blocking has bitten.

The opposite case comes from ACMA. It says its checks on the police calls found the rules worked, with the traffic traced to overseas telcos and no Australian breach. If ACMA is right, the new code adds less than it promises.

Official reports count the scam calls blocked, not the ones that reach Australian phones. The verdict rests on one assumption: ACMA enforces the 2027 code harder than it enforced the warnings of 2022 and 2024.

The new scam laws should mean fewer scam calls reach your phone from 2027, but they won't stop them, and scammers are already moving to websites and apps. Confidence: Likely (fewer calls), Very unlikely (no calls). Older Australians and anyone who still answers unknown numbers gain most, while number wholesalers and their business customers face more checks and more cost.

This piece draws on 17 sources: five primary reports and releases from ACMA, the National Anti-Scam Centre and Treasury, one peer-reviewed study, two law firm analyses, and news reports from Australia, the US and the UK. TPG's 98% figure is the company's own analysis and could not be independently checked; Aussie Broadband's response is included. The 2026 phone loss figure is Scamwatch data as reported by Information Age; the period it covers ends before 27 October. We worked out the phone share of Scamwatch losses (21.6% in 2025, 33.6% in 2024), the 32.4% fall and the 84% share from the published dollar figures. Researched with AI tools; checked and edited by VOID.

Phone companies already block hundreds of millions of scam calls a year, and phone scam losses fell by a third in 2025, though 2026 losses are already close to the 2025 total. From March 2027, new laws force telcos to check who they sell phone numbers to, which targets the main leak. Scammers won't vanish, though: they're shifting to websites and social media, where losses keep rising.