CommBank already had tools like NameCheck, CallerCheck, and CustomerCheck to help customers protect themselves. But the number of scam victims wasn't dropping. Internal data showed that 84% of scam complaints over a four-month period were text message scams — yet in research, customers consistently told us they were confident in their ability to spot them. The gap between confidence and reality became the core of the problem we set out to solve.

I lead two rounds of qualitative research to understand the behaviour behind scam vulnerability.

Round One: Twelve customer interviews to test desirability and concept preferences across five experience formats: a chatbot, a website upload tool, an in-payment notification, a message-forwarding service, and a proactive scanner. Customers liked the idea of ScamChecker, but felt they didn't need it. No concept emerged as a clear winner, and it was hard to tell whether people would actually use the tool in practice.

Round Two: Eight narrative interviews with people who had been scammed. We asked each participant to walk us through their experience from start to finish — what they were doing, how they felt, and what made them fall for it.

What We Found: People don't fall for scams because they're careless. They fall for them because scams are designed to feel real. They arrive at the right moment, reference something relevant in the person's life, look legitimate, and create just enough urgency to short-circuit scepticism. Nobody feels suspicious at the moment they're being scammed.

After reviewing our findings coupled with an internal POC, the call was made to build. Even with mixed desirability signals, the business case was clear, if a tool like this could prevent even one customer from being scammed, it had earned its place.

ScamCheck was also a deliberate first step toward a longer vision: a ScamChecker Engine that could serve retail customers, business customers, frontline staff, and fraud analysts over time. The text message checker was the first use case, small enough to test, meaningful enough to matter, and a foundation to build on.

To get it to market quickly, we partnered with Truyu, an existing X15 venture, building ScamChecker natively within their iOS and Android apps. I led the design across both teams, collaborating with CommBank engineers to map the UX to technical requirements, and with the Truyu product team to design within their existing product.