Scam and Phishing Triage for Adelaide Families: An Expert Second Opinion on the Message You’re Not Sure About

Your mum forwards you a text from “Australia Post” with a tracking link she’s about to click. Your teenager shows you a DM offering a part-time job paying $40 an hour for “task-based work from home”. An invoice lands in your inbox from a tradie you actually used last month, but the bank details look different to the receipt on the fridge. You are the family’s unofficial IT person, and you are tired of guessing. Scam and Phishing Triage from Cyber by Exegesis gives an Adelaide family a 24–48 hour expert verdict on a specific message, link, or invoice — before someone in the household clicks, pays, or replies.

The problem

ACCC Scamwatch lists phishing as a top reported scam category in Australia, and the current wave of alerts — food-delivery impersonations, fake crypto platforms, job-recruitment SMS pretending to be Amazon or YouTube — shows how fast the playbook rotates. The signals families used to rely on (broken English, weird sender addresses) are largely gone. Today’s scam messages are clean, well-branded, and increasingly assisted by AI. ACSC’s own consumer guidance asks individuals and families to slow down and verify before acting, but in a household where three generations share devices and accounts, the slowdown rarely happens — someone is always in a hurry.

The hardest scams to triage are the ones that arrive plausibly: a Medicare-looking SMS the week you actually had a GP visit, a school-fee invoice the week fees are due, an “ATO refund” right after tax time. A family member’s gut says “probably fine”. You are not sure. That gap — the gap between “probably fine” and “actually safe” — is what this engagement closes.

What Scam and Phishing Triage does

Cyber by Exegesis runs a fixed-scope expert review of one suspicious item per engagement:

• A verdict — likely scam, likely legitimate, or inconclusive — returned in writing within one business day.
• The specific signals we checked: sender domain and authentication records, link destination after redirects, registration age of the domain, presence in ACCC Scamwatch and ACSC alert feeds, image and branding provenance, and payment-detail cross-checks where relevant.
• Plain-English next steps for the household: who in the family to tell, what to delete, what to keep as evidence.
• If you have already clicked, paid, or replied: a clear sequence — which passwords to rotate first, which accounts to lock, who to call at your bank, when to report to Scamwatch, when an OAIC notifiable data breach concern applies, and when eSafety is the right channel (especially for messages targeting children).
• A short written summary you can forward to the family member who received the message.

Cyber by Exegesis is the cyber consultancy line of Exegesis — the same company behind the DRMO live product. Triage is deliberately scoped small so families can use it the moment doubt arrives, not a week later.

How it works

1. You submit the suspicious item through the waitlist intake — a screenshot, a forwarded email with full headers, or a photo of the invoice. We confirm scope within a few hours.
2. We run the technical checks (sender authentication, link resolution, domain age, listed-alert cross-reference) and the contextual checks (does this match a current Scamwatch alert pattern, does the invoice match the supplier’s known details).
3. We return a written verdict with the signals we found, expressed in plain English a parent or grandparent can read.
4. If the verdict is “likely scam” and someone has already acted, we sit on a 20-minute call to walk the household through the response sequence in priority order.
5. We leave you with a short reference sheet of the three or four checks your family can run themselves next time, so the next obvious one doesn’t need us at all.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide households share a particular shape — multi-generational living is common, retirees and university students often share the same Wi-Fi and sometimes the same devices, and the city’s compactness means family members rotate through each other’s homes weekly. That is a cross-generational risk surface: the scam that targets a grandparent’s MyGov often reaches the grandchild’s phone too, because they’re on the same family plan or the same shared streaming login. A single expert verdict on one suspicious message — delivered before the household acts on it — protects everyone connected to that account tree, not just the person who received it.

Sources

• ACCC Scamwatch (National Anti-Scam Centre): https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/
• ACSC guidance for individuals and families: https://www.cyber.gov.au/protect-yourself
• eSafety Commissioner (for scams and harmful messages targeting children): https://www.esafety.gov.au/
• OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches scheme (where a scam results in an eligible breach of personal information you hold): https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/notifiable-data-breaches
• Cyber by Exegesis — Scam and Phishing Triage (waitlist)

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when Cyber by Exegesis opens Scam and Phishing Triage for Adelaide families

We are sequencing triage intake by household type and message channel (email, SMS, social DM). Join the waitlist with the channel where your family is currently seeing the most suspicious messages — we will reach out when we are ready to take your first item.