ACMA Authority Member Samantha Yorke joined Sally Sara on ABC Radio National Breakfast on 15 June 2026 to discuss the SMS Sender ID Register.
Interview audio
Interview transcript
Sally:
If you have a mobile phone, the chances are you will receive a scam or SMS impersonating a legitimate business. SMS scams cost Australians millions of dollars each year. But from July 1, the Australian Communications and Media Authority will bring in a new tool designed to make the identification of fake messages easier.
So how will it work? Samantha Yorke is ACMA's Telecommunications and Consumer Lead as well as the Authority's inaugural Chief AI Officer. Samantha, welcome to Breakfast.
Samantha:
Good morning, Sally.Great to be here.
Sally:
How will this tool work?
Samantha:
So you rightly pointed out, Sally, Australians lose almost $18 million to scams delivered by text messages just in 2025. And the new Register that we'll be implementing on the 1st of July will help Australians distinguish between legitimate text messages that are coming from businesses that send their message that identify their business.
So it might look like a message from CommBank or from Coles or Woolies. And those messages will need to be registered from the 1st of July. If they're not registered, they will actually be collapsed into one stream of text messages that will be labelled as unverified and they will likely end up in your spam folder in your messaging app.
Sally:
But we will still receive them?
Samantha:
You'll still receive them, at least in the beginning. And we are urging customers of these brands to be very careful with messages that come through as unverified because they may be scams or they may just be coming from a business that hasn't yet registered their ID.
Sally:
Can the verification be replicated in any way?
Samantha:
It would be very hard, Sally, for a bad actor to get through the hoops that we've introduced as part of the process of registering an ID.
So, for instance, companies need to verify that they have a clear link to the organisation that they're wanting to register, such as matching a registered business name or a trademark. And the person that's actually filing the application needs to verify the organisation on the Australian Business Register. So we've designed the process to be quite difficult for a bad actor to be able to engage in.
Sally:
With these scam messages, I mean, part of the concerns obviously are people getting scammed out of money, but the other thing is the nuisance value of these things. If we're still going to receive them, is there limited value in this system?
Samantha:
Well, this Register will be introduced in a couple of phases, Sally. So, the first phase, just as we're ramping up and businesses are still registering their brands, is that any unregistered brand texts that come through get filtered into that unverified stream, as I mentioned.
The next phase of this will be, once we're confident that legitimate texts are not being caught up in this, that the telcos will start blocking these messages so that they're actually not even coming through to your phone. And you're right to highlight the nuisance factor of these texts, but the more insidious and dangerous factor, Sally, is that these texts are often designed to steal your personal information or to actually scam you out of money. The personal information element is important because once scammers have access to your full name, your address, your date of birth and other identifying information, they can then pretend to be you and talk directly to your bank or to other places where your money is stored and cause real lasting damage to you.
Sally:
How many businesses have already registered for this, which is only a couple of weeks away now?
Samantha:
It is only a couple of weeks away, and we have more than 17,000 sender IDs that have already been registered. Now, we are madly working with telcos to get more registered by the 1st of July deadline, but we will be continuing to register businesses beyond that date. And as I mentioned, working through those phases of the register so that unverified messages that are coming through are having less and less legitimate messages falling into that category.
Sally:
So you've got 17,000 so far. What's your estimate of how many legitimate operators will register with you?
Samantha:
It's a bit tricky to know exactly how many sender IDs are being used. It's been funny when we've been working with individual businesses, often they don't know how many sender IDs their business is using.
But we estimate that there could be around 100,000, but it's not a hard and fast number. One company may own hundreds of sender IDs, for instance, if they're a large business with different aspects to their business. So, we appreciate that there's a large number still left to be registered.
Sally:
So maybe 80% haven't registered yet?
Samantha:
Well, potentially, but we are working with the telcos to get as many registered over the next couple of weeks and then beyond, as I mentioned. The important thing is that when consumers see this new stream in their text messages, that they exercise caution, Sally, that they recognise that, yes, there may be scams in there, but there may also be some legitimate texts coming through from their medical practice or from their bank.
Sally:
Samantha Yorke, thank you for your time this morning.
Samantha:
It's a pleasure, Sally.