ASIC’s Federal Court action against Clark Family Pty Ltd escalated on Monday as commissioner Alan Kirkland told a directions hearing that up to 70 loan-comparison websites may have misled consumers by reselling personal data while posing as independent marketplaces.
The corporate regulator alleges the Clark Family network captured mortgage and insurance leads through SEO-heavy domains, then sold contact details to a handful of lenders without clearly disclosing the commercial relationship. Riley Paterson’s security desk tracks these cases because data resale fuels follow-on scams: once a lead list leaks, criminals impersonate banks with texts that reference the exact loan amount a consumer typed into a comparison form.
What the regulator says happened
According to ASIC’s statement of claim filed Friday, many sites displayed tables that appeared to rank dozens of lenders but routed every application to related brokers paid on commission. Consumers who clicked “free assessment” boxes allegedly agreed to broad marketing consents buried in terms linked in eight-point grey text.
Kirkland used a Monday media appearance to warn that AI-generated comparison sites amplify the risk. Scammers can spin up convincing clones overnight, complete with fake Trustpilot reviews, while licensed businesses bear the reputational damage when victims discover their data was on-sold.
Consumer defences
ASIC advises checking the professional registers for any adviser named on a comparison page, then calling the lender on a publicly listed number rather than a callback form. For insurance leads, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority has seen a rise in complaints where consumers thought they were comparing four insurers but were placed with a single underwriter’s white-label product.
Clark Family’s lawyers declined to comment Monday beyond filing a notice disputing the scale of the website network. The case is listed for a case management hearing in October, with ASIC seeking injunctions that would force the operator to publish corrective notices on each domain.
Broader crackdown
The court push sits alongside ASIC’s separate warning that generative AI deepfakes are driving record scam takedowns, though Monday’s hearing focused on old-fashioned lead monetisation. Banks including Westpac have tightened partner audits after internal reviews found comparison-site referrals carried higher early-arrears rates than branch-originated loans.
For households comparing loans this week amid rate-hike nerves, the lesson is procedural: treat a comparison site like a stranger at your door. If the table cannot name which credit licence backs each offer, close the tab and walk into a branch or use your existing bank’s offset tools instead.