The Australian Consumer Fraud Taskforce will launch National Consumer Fraud Week with a warning that scammers can target you anytime, anywhere, anyhow.

Scammers do not stop at anything to target victims, including adopting a personal touch. Watch out for scammers – whether you are answering a phone call, opening mail, online chatting with friends, shopping or even looking for love.

Read more: National Consumer Fraud Week focuses on consumer protection

Communications Compliance, a newly created industry monitoring body set up to monitor telco compliance with the new Telecommunications Consumer Protection Code, is seeking nominations or recommendations from consumer bodies for a consumer director to sit on its Board. 

Read more: Consumer representatives on Communications Compliance Board

Complaints from small businesses about their telecommunications services increased 52 per cent in the last financial year, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) reports in the latest issue of TIO Talks, published today.

More than 22,000 complaints were made in 2010-11 by small businesses unable to resolve issues with service providers. Complaints about inadequate or incorrect customer service advice, poor mobile phone coverage, broken promises and bill disputes were the most common issues.

Read more: Small businesses make more complaints to TIO

The Australian Communications and Media Authority doesn’t seem to understand the needs of consumers  Against the advice of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the ACMA has decided not to implement a default bar on subscription text message services. Instead, the ACMA has sided with industry in a soft-regulatory approach that is just what the revenue hungry and consumer indifferent telecoms companies want. It’s just another decision that casts doubt on whether the ACMA is actually up to the job of protecting consumers.

Read more: ACMA makes a bad call on Mobile Premium Service barring

ACCAN has released its 2013 Grants Scheme Guidelines ahead of the 2013 round of the ACCAN Grants Scheme, which opens Monday 18^th February.

Read more: 2013 Grants Scheme opening soon

People experiencing homelessness, Aboriginal youth and the Deaf community are among the consumers set to benefit from this year's ACCAN grants scheme.

Read more: New ACCAN grants projects announced

For communications consumers, the challenge of overcoming information overload to choose a new product and service is sometimes just too much. As one participant in the Seeking Straight Answers research puts it, "[I just want] someone to do the work, someone who knows what they're doing to find me the best deal...There's so many things you've gotta do that the inconvenience of doing all that outweighs any benefits you're going to get".

Read more: Seeking Straight Answers: a short video

A reminder to ACCAN members that nominations for Directors to fill three vacancies on the ACCAN Board are now open and will close at 5pm AEDT 24 September 2013. Newly elected Board members at the 2013 AGM will sit for a three-year term until the Annual General Meeting in 2016.

Read more: ACCAN Board nominations open

With less than two weeks until the 2013 Federal Election, there's still a lot of confusion among the general public regarding the National Broadband Network (NBN), one of the biggest election issues. ACCAN has compared both parties' NBN policies, including what the Greens think, as we want all consumers to have a clearer idea of what the competing NBN policies will offer them.

Read more: ACCAN’s quick guide to the competing NBN policies

When the trial of audio description (AD) ended on 5 November last year, Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy acknowledged the strong desire for the service to continue and agreed to work together with all parties towards establishing a permanent AD service on Australian TV in the future.

Read more: Communiqué: an update on audio description on TV

Transcript of the speech given by ACCAN Chief Executive Teresa Corbin at the CommsDay Melbourne Congress.

Read more: Speech: Teresa Corbin at CommsDay Melbourne Congress 2012

ACCAN has been asked to nominate two consumer representatives to sit on the Communications Compliance Advisory Committee. Communications Compliance is a newly formed company established to monitor telecommunication industry compliance with the recently approved Telecommunications Consumer Protections (TCP) Code.

Read more: Call for consumer representatives