Scam and Phishing Triage for Brisbane Individuals: Get an Expert Verdict Before You Click, Reply, or Pay
You are standing in the kitchen with your phone in your hand. The message says it is from your bank, or Australia Post, or the ATO, or someone you nearly recognise. It wants you to click a link, confirm a detail, or pay an invoice that “should” have gone through last week. Something feels off — but you cannot quite name what. Scam and Phishing Triage from Cyber by Exegesis is the engagement designed to give you a clear verdict on that specific message, before you act on it.
The problem
ACCC Scamwatch has consistently identified phishing and scam messages as the top reported scam category in Australia, and the methods are getting harder to spot. The same Scamwatch alerts feed shows the rotation — food delivery scams, fake crypto trading platforms, job recruitment scams via SMS impersonating Amazon or YouTube, fake invoices, romance approaches, “your parcel is held” texts. Generative AI has stripped out the spelling and grammar cues people used to rely on, and Australian phone numbers and domain names are routinely spoofed.
ACSC guidance for individuals and families is good, and worth reading, but it is general. It cannot tell you whether this SMS, this email, this invoice in your inbox right now is a scam. By the time you have searched the sender online, asked the family group chat, and second-guessed yourself for twenty minutes, you have either clicked it anyway or paid for peace of mind you do not actually have.
What Scam and Phishing Triage does
Cyber by Exegesis runs a small fixed-scope engagement for individuals:
- You forward the suspicious message, link, invoice, or screenshot to a single intake address with a brief note about how it reached you.
- We review the message against the specific signals that matter for that channel — sender domain and authentication, link destination, lookalike characters, header anomalies, payment-detail mismatches, urgency and authority cues, and the current Scamwatch alerts feed.
- You receive a written verdict — likely scam, likely legitimate, or inconclusive — with the specific signals we checked and why.
- If you have already clicked, replied, entered credentials, or paid, the response also includes immediate next steps: who to call at your bank, how to report to ACCC Scamwatch, how to change credentials in the right order, and (if relevant) when to engage IDCARE or the eSafety Commissioner.
- A short follow-up window if the situation evolves over the next 48 hours.
Cyber by Exegesis is the cyber consultancy line of Exegesis — the same company behind the DRMO live product. Triage is deliberately scoped tight: we are not your bank, your IT support, or your lawyer. We give you a defensible read on the message in front of you, so you can act on it with confidence.
How it works
- You join the waitlist and, when active, receive a single intake email address and a short form covering channel (SMS, email, voice, social DM), sender, and what action the message is asking for.
- You forward the message or attach the screenshot, with full headers where possible.
- We triage within an agreed response window and return a written verdict with the signals checked.
- If you have already acted on it, we include a prioritised next-steps list — bank contact first, then credential rotation, then reporting to ACCC Scamwatch and (if personal data is exposed) understanding your rights under the OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
- We hold a short follow-up window in case the scammer comes back through a different channel or the situation changes.
Why this matters in Brisbane
Brisbane households sit inside the same national scam volume the ACCC reports on, with local flavour — property-settlement redirects timed to South-East Queensland conveyancing patterns, “delivery held” texts hitting harder during cyclone-season online shopping, and tradie invoice fraud tracking Brisbane’s renovation activity. The right response is almost always the same: do not act on the message until someone qualified has read it. A triage verdict that takes a few hours to produce is cheap insurance against a transfer you cannot recall or credentials you cannot easily un-share.
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
- OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches scheme: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/notifiable-data-breaches
- eSafety Commissioner (for image-based abuse, harassment, or sextortion-adjacent scams): https://www.esafety.gov.au/
- Cyber by Exegesis — Scam and Phishing Triage (waitlist)
Join the waitlist
We are sequencing intake by channel (email and SMS first, voice and social DMs second). Join the waitlist with the channels you most often receive suspicious messages on — we will tell you when we are ready to take your first triage.