Summary of outcomes: compliance priorities 2024–25

Our focus

We said we would focus on how telcos are complying with their obligations under the Telecommunications (Financial Hardship) Industry Standard 2024, including monitoring how financial hardship arrangements are offered, credit management actions are handled, and record-keeping rules are followed.

What we did

• Audited 25 telcos to assess their compliance with requirements in the Standard.
• Conducted investigations when we suspected non-compliance.
• Made direct compliance contact with telcos when concerns were identified.
• Continued our consumer education campaigns.

Key outcomes

As a result of our audit, we investigated 5 telcos and found that 4 had not complied with one or more of the obligations in the Standard, including identifying and communicating with financial hardship customers and training of staff. We expect to announce the related enforcement actions for the 4 non-compliant telcos in early 2025-26.

We put the remaining 20 telcos in the audit on notice regarding their compliance. This has resulted in changes to their practices to achieve better outcomes for their customers.

We made direct compliance contact with 5 telcos, leading to improvements to their websites and payment assistance policies.

To help Australians access financial hardship support from their telco, we also commenced awareness raising of telco financial hardship programs and associated consumer protections via the ACMA’s social media channels.

Our focus

We said we would expand our work assessing how telcos can help customers experiencing domestic and family violence with an intelligence-gathering audit to focus on telco rules to keep affected customers connected. 

The then Minister for Communications directed us to make an industry standard to protect telecommunications customers experiencing domestic and family violence. A direction was made on 10 December 2024.  

We consulted widely to inform the development of an effective and trauma-informed standard to provide an appropriate level of support to telco consumers experiencing domestic and family violence.

What we did

• Consultation was key to our work. We consulted widely with a range of consumer groups, experts, the telco industry and across government—including advocacy groups, people with lived experience of domestic and family violence, First Nations Australians, people with a disability and regional communities.
• We held industry and consumer advocate workshops, met with survivor-advocates with lived experience, and followed up on selected issues where changes had been made to identify any potential technical or implementation challenges.

Key outcomes

On 6 June 2025, we made the Telecommunications (Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Consumer Protections) Industry Standard 2025. A limited number of provisions will commence on 1 July 2025 with a delayed and staggered commencement for all other provisions. 

Provisions commencing 1 July include:

• requirements to reverse disconnection, suspension and restriction of a service where an affected person, on first contact, raises that there is a domestic and family violence safety risk
• the prohibition requiring an affected person to interact with a perpetrator
• a requirement to publish information available for DFV support that the telco offers and DFV support contacts.

Other requirements will come into effect on 1 January 2026 for large telcos (those with 30,000 or more services in operation) and 1 April 2026 for small telcos.

Our focus

We said we would educate consumers about, and enforce compliance with, new credit card and crypto bans, keep raising awareness of BetStop – the National Self-Exclusion Register™ (NSER), enforce industry compliance and explore new tools and approaches to disrupt illegal gambling services provided to Australians.

What we did

We reminded all licensed wagering operators of the new rules, the start date and ACMA expectations before they came in. We reviewed their Ts&Cs and contacted operators whose Ts&Cs still referred to credit card and/or cryptocurrency deposits.

We also conducted a consumer awareness campaign for the new rules and to raise awareness of the NSER. We implemented additional ways to disrupt access and transactions to illegal gambling services including partnering with AUSTRAC to establish the Fintel Alliance Micro-Laundering and Illegal Online Gambling project to share information about transactions and alerting games developers that their games were available to Australians on illegal services.

We also reported illegal gambling content to entities involved in hosting these services and social media platforms for removal and engaged with additional internet service providers to expand website blocking activities.

Key outcomes

Our consumer awareness campaign about the credit card ban resulted in significant increases in traffic to information on ACMA website. There was a very high level of industry compliance with the credit card ban, requiring no investigations.

Since the NSER launched in August 2023, more than 43,000 Australians have chosen to self-exclude from all licensed online and phone wagering providers. More than 29,000 people are currently self-excluded.

We have continued to build community awareness of the program through our communications campaign, as well as enforce rules that wagering providers must promote the NSER to their customers.

In 2024–25, we began 10 investigations into non-compliance with the NSER requirements under the IGA and closed 9 investigations. Our first 6 investigation outcomes included:

• a penalty of $1 million in infringement notices
• accepting 3 court-enforceable undertakings
• issuing 2 formal warnings.

Following these investigations, we released comprehensive compliance advice to the industry in May 2025 to educate providers about our investigation findings and compliance expectations.

Our expanded suite of enforcement tools has resulted in increased disruption and will continue to be used.

Our focus

We said we would work to disrupt the distribution and impact of these scams by enforcing rules that telcos need to follow to identify and prevent SMS scams and continue to develop the SMS sender ID register.

What we did

• Conducted investigations when we identified potential non-compliance.
• Engaged with industry on scam disruption matters.
• Established a pilot SMS sender ID register.
• Conducted consumer education on prevalent impersonation scams.

Key outcomes

We promoted and enforced the Reducing Scam Calls and Scam SMS Industry Code, which requires telcos to monitor, detect, and block scam messages and calls, and to share information with each other and with the ACMA. Since the rules began in July 2022, telcos have reported blocking over 897 million scam messages up to 31 March 2025. In 2024–25, to 31 March 2025 over 228 million scam messages were blocked.

We also monitored how telcos shared information, directing 3 telcos to comply after finding they broke the rules and progressed 2 other investigations. 

We progressed setting up a mandatory SMS sender ID Register, which we expect to launch during 2025–26. The Register will protect the sender IDs (shortened business or agency names) used in SMS from being impersonated and provide a safe communications channel for use. We started building the system and consulted on the new rules in March to April 2025. Our pilot register had a 73% increase in registrations from when the pilot began in December 2023.

We worked closely with telcos on scam prevention by sharing data to help them detect and block scams, monitoring how they trace scam sources, providing intelligence reports on new scam threats and supporting the use of AI and machine learning to improve scam detection and prevention. We also ran public awareness campaigns to help Australians spot and report SMS impersonation scams, including a digital campaign on government impersonation scams and issuing 6 consumer scam alerts.

We are also supporting the National Anti-Scam Centre by sharing real time intelligence of SMS and email scams reaching Australia.

Our focus

We said we would enforce spam rules to stop commercial messages being misleadingly sent as ‘service’ or non-commercial messages. This especially applied to products or services where there may be a high risk to consumers, like interactive wagering or financial services. We also focused on compliance in the retail sector by educating businesses about spam rules and taking formal action where serious and systemic matters were found.

What we did

• Engaged with industry on misleading spam messages.
• Conducted investigations when we found non-compliance.
• Published a Statement of Expectations on the use of consent in direct marketing.  
• Engaged with industry about their compliance obligations.

Key outcomes

We penalised 4 businesses over $12.5 million after we found them to have breached the rules. We accepted court-enforceable undertakings from these businesses, requiring them to have their systems independently reviewed and to make improvements. We also started 3 further investigations.

To educate industry, we created a Statement of Expectations about how consent should be used in telemarketing and email marketing. It outlines the basic legal requirements and offers guidance to help businesses follow the rules. We also ran multiple education activities for industry. These included speaking at industry events, sharing pre-recorded content about compliance, and directly contacting businesses that may be sending misleading messages to remind them of their responsibilities and the penalties for breaking the rules.

Our focus

We said that we would continue to build on our efforts to tackle the supply of dodgy devices, work with online platforms to proactively remove ads for non-compliant devices, develop a voluntary pledge with eCommerce platforms and educate Australians about the risks of buying these devices online.

What we did

Developed a draft voluntary pledge addressing the sale and resale of non-compliant and illegal devices on their platforms:

• Conducted audits of select e-commerce platforms.
• Engaged with online platforms and suppliers to remove advertisements for non-compliant devices.
• Educated consumers and suppliers about the problems with buying non-compliant devices and raised awareness of the rules.

Key outcomes

Our audit of select online platforms identified 1,162 advertisements for non-compliant devices, all were removed upon request by the platforms.

We ran an advertising campaign across online platforms to educate and inform consumers over the Christmas/New Year holiday period when sales are high.

We began discussions with a range of platforms on the proposed pledge as we work towards launching a pledge in the latter half of 2025.

We developed an information hub, informed by consumer research. It includes educational and consumer resources that will better support consumers to understand the rules for radiocommunications and telecommunications devices.

Our focus

We said that we would continue to oversee the performance of digital platforms under the voluntary Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. We also said we would work with the Australian Government to develop and strengthen our regulatory powers and, if new legislation was passed by the Australian parliament, we would focus on implementation and addressing digital platforms’ compliance with it.

What we did

• Engaged with industry and the peak body, Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI), to encourage participation in the code.
• Provided our third report to government on the effectiveness of signatory efforts under the code.
• Encouraged better transparency and reporting about the steps that digital platforms are taking to address harmful misinformation and disinformation.

Key outcomes

We worked with the Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) and signatories to the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation to improve transparency of platforms. We advised on how to bolster the code’s reporting framework and improve code governance.  

On 24 November 2024, the Australian Government announced that it would not proceed with the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.

Our focus

We said that we would focus on the compliance of carriers, carriage service providers and Emergency Call Persons so that calls are successfully carried to emergency services. We also said that we would implement tasks that fall to us within the Australian Government’s response to the recommendations of the Report into the Optus outage of 8 November 2023.

What we did

• Implemented 6 recommendations from the Australian Government response to the Report into the Optus outage by making the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 and amendments to both the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination 2019 and the Telecommunications (Consumer Complaints Handling) Industry Standard 2018.
• Finalised 4 investigations into compliance with the determination, 2 of which resulted in combined payments of $15 million in infringement notices, issued an infringement notice of $18,780 to Telstra for disruption to the 106-emergency call service (the maximum penalty available) and received an enforceable undertaking from Telstra to improve its processes. An announcement on the enforcement action related to the fourth investigation is imminent.

Key outcomes

Our amendments ensured that all mobile phones operating on Australian networks can make emergency calls to Triple Zero after 3G networks closed. We made new rules for telcos to communicate information about major outages to customers, the public, other telcos and government stakeholders, and updated rules to include arrangements for significant local outages impacting regional and remote communities. 

We implemented further changes to address the Australian Government response to the Report into the Optus outage. This included requiring mobile network towers to be wilted during core network outages to ensure emergency camp-on call arrangements work, carriers to share real-time information about outages with emergency service organisations (police, fire, ambulance), carriers to report to the ACMA within 45 days of a major outage detailing how similar outages will be prevented in the future and developing outage protocols. 

In parallel, we amended the Telecommunications (Consumer Complaints Handling) Industry Standard 2018 to address the Australian Government response to the Report into the Optus outage. This implemented a response to recommendation 12 by creating pathways for complaints related to network outages.