Investment scams cost Australians A$837.7 million in 2025, the country's largest single category of scam loss, according to the National Anti-Scam Center. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has opened a register of legitimate licensee website addresses, inviting more than 6,500 firms to list the sites consumers can trust.
The move flips the logic of the regulator's recent work, which leaned on stripping out fakes after they surfaced. ASIC removed 11,964 phishing and investment scam websites in 2025, a 90% increase on the prior year and roughly 32 sites a day.
A new FM Intelligence analysis asks whether certifying the real sites can do what those takedowns have not, and pull the loss numbers down. Read it on the FM Intelligence portal here.
From Tearing Down Fakes to Certifying the Real Ones
Rather than chasing clones once they appear, the regulator now wants to give the public a reference point for what a licensed broker's genuine address looks like, a shift FM covered when ASIC first signaled the register.
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The clone problem already lands hard on brokers themselves. Pepperstone has said that taking down fake versions of its site is close to a full-time job for its fraud team, with the firm buying up domain variants to stay ahead of impersonators.
Three Conditions That Decide the Payoff
The analysis finds the register's effect will hinge on three things. The first is how many licensees sign up while participation stays voluntary. The second is whether advertising platforms check submissions against the list. The third is how ASIC handles authorized representatives, who operate under another firm's license and sit outside the register's scope.
Each gap points to the same risk, that a partial list leaves consumers more confused rather than better protected. The regulator has already warned that scammers cloned its own Moneysmart consumer site, a reminder that even official addresses get copied.
What the UK and Italy Show
Other regulators have reached for adjacent tools with uneven results. In Britain, the Financial Conduct Authority pairs a long-running register with a public Warning List, and in December 2025 it added a consumer verification tool called Firm Checker.
Even so, about 800,000 people reported losing money to investment and pension scams over the prior year, and UK Finance put investment-fraud losses at £144.4 million in 2024.
Italy went a different way. Its market regulator Consob has held the power to order internet providers to block illegal financial sites since July 2019, and by April 2026 it was still adding to a tally past 1,000 domains. Blocking cuts off access, while Australia's whitelist tries to certify trust at the other end.
Singapore moved the liability itself, with total scam losses easing only after banks and telecommunications firms were made partly responsible for reimbursing victims. Australia's register asks brokers to opt in rather than placing duties on the platforms that carry the ads, a distinction the analysis treats as central to whether losses fall.
The full FM Intelligence analysis breaks down the 2025 loss profile by age, gender and state, sets out base, bull and bear projections for 2026, and compares Australia's whitelist with domain blocking in Italy and register verification in the UK.
Read the full analysis on the FM Intelligence portal: After 12,000 Takedowns, ASIC Turns to a Whitelist of Australia's Licensed Broker Sites
