TPG says 98 per cent of scam calls to Vodafone came via Aussie Broadband's Symbio

TPG Telecom, which owns Vodafone, has publicly blamed Aussie Broadband for a carrier role in nearly all the scam calls that reached Vodafone customers across one year. Its analysis covered July 2025 to July 2026 and found that 98 per cent of the scam calls, more than 24 million, passed through Symbio. Symbio is an internet phone company that Aussie Broadband owns.

Symbio supplies Australian numbers in bulk to companies that use them to place calls over the internet. Aussie Broadband chief executive Brian Maher said about 500 Symbio customers resell those numbers, and each may pass them to thousands of further users. Because Symbio cannot see who its customers sell to, he said, stopping scammers is very difficult.

TPG executive Vanessa Hicks said the company hands Aussie Broadband evidence and data whenever it spots a scam campaign. Hicks said TPG wants "more urgent action to stop this activity closer to the source and stop these calls reaching Australians". She said TPG cannot simply cut another telco off from the Vodafone network, because it often has only milliseconds to judge whether a call is legitimate. Hicks also called it disappointing that Symbio has faced no financial penalties, and TPG rejected the suggestion that commercial rivalry motivated its public criticism.

Maher said Aussie Broadband disconnects persistent bad actors and relies on detection software and a team of more than 20 people. He said further investment is planned but would not say how many extra staff will be hired. He also said the company had made "significant progress" over the past month, though it needs far more information shared with it. As the largest wholesaler in the market, he said, Aussie Broadband would see a higher proportion of scam calls. Maher said it was unfortunate that TPG had gone public, but that Aussie Broadband accepts TPG's frustration and wants to work with it on a solution.

Vodafone's fraud team found that calls from Symbio's network had impersonated police stations in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia, as well as the Australian Federal Police. Hicks said one such scam generated more than 2,400 calls in a single week in September. The ACMA said its checks on that scam showed the traffic was identified, notifications went upstream and blocking took place. The regulator said the apparent sources were several overseas telcos and it found no non-compliance by an Australian telco.

The ACMA warned Symbio in 2024 after finding it was not properly investigating scam calls and was slow to share information with other telcos. Symbio had also been warned in 2022 over failing to investigate and trace scam calls. Independent cybercrime investigator Dan Halpin examined 8,000 numbers reported by the public to his platform and found Symbio was the top carrier linked to suspect numbers, ahead of Telstra. Optus and Telstra declined to give specifics on whether they had seen high volumes of scam calls traced to Aussie Broadband, and Optus said no single carrier consistently accounted for the majority.