Google pushed out its September Pixel Drop this week. Most of the coverage went to the extras – shortcuts to your favourite contacts, a refreshed VIPs widget that lets you call or text in one tap, and two months of Audible for anyone on a Pixel 6 or newer. The line worth noting for business owners is a smaller one: the update adds scam alerts to the handset itself.
That is a sensible direction. A warning that appears on the screen before you pick up is worth more than a warning that arrives in a newsletter a fortnight later, and handset makers and telcos have been steadily adding this kind of filtering. If you or your staff use Pixels, the update arrives automatically, though some features roll out over the following weeks.
Where it stops helping
Here is the part to be clear-eyed about. A scam alert on a phone protects the phone. The losses that really hurt an Australian small business usually do not arrive as an obvious dodgy call – they arrive as an email that looks exactly like a supplier’s invoice, with the bank details quietly changed. No handset feature sees that.
Four habits do more than any single setting:
- Never action a change of bank details from an email. Ring the supplier on a number you already had, not the one printed on the invoice.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication for email first. Email is the account that unlocks all the others.
- Agree a rule that any payment over a set figure needs a second set of eyes before it goes out.
- Keep phones and laptops updating automatically, so protections like this one actually reach the people using them.
Treat the new scam alerts as one useful layer, not a plan. The device is the easy part to fix; the process around your invoices and your email is where the money is either protected or lost.
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