An old scam resurrected. And it's completely legal.

February 5, 2026

If you own a business name you will receive an emailed notification from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) when renewal of the name comes due. You will also occasionally receive a very well presented printed invoice in the mail from a company with "Registration", "Registry" or something similar in its name offering to renew the business name for you. I have received two of these so far prompting me to pay for renewal of the business name "Oberon Matters" which expires in March.

These letters are a form of fraud, but unfortunately they are completely legal. If you choose to pay there is nothing you can do about it later.

But why would such renewal services count as fraud. Consider the images below,

The first is one of the invoices I've received. The second is the price list for renewal through the ASIC web site. You pay the scammers $99 or $171 and they log onto the ASIC site and pay $45 or $104. And they keep the rest.

This scam relies on the fact that a lot of companies will pay official-looking invoices without question. And who wants to lose their business name because someone forgot to pay the bill?

And why is it legal? Because they don't pretend to be a legitimate supplier like Telstra or your energy company and they make no threats, just ask you to send them money. Charities and street beggars do it all the time.

Fake invoicing used to be a very big business a few years ago, and while it seems to have calmed down a bit lately crooks are always looking for loopholes in the law that they can drive through. (Think of the way that companies promoting obvious pyramid schemes keep within a nanometre of the legislative definitions of "pyramid scheme".)

Be careful out there.

Anecdote 1.

I had a section of a large government department as a client. I was chatting to the woman who did the accounts for the section and noticed a fake invoice on her desk. I put in in the wastepaper basket. She was horrified.

Her desk was up against a wall and there was a cork board on the wall. Pinned to the board at eye height was a memo from the NSW Premier that had been sent to all departments telling them not to pay any invoices from this particular company. The accounts clerk had to have pinned the notice there and had to look at it every time she sat at her desk, but she was still about to approve payment of one of the invoices.

I always hoped she didn't retrieve the invoice from the bin after I left.

Anecdote 2.

When I was working for the Computer Science Department at Sydney University part of my job was to check invoices payable by the department. (It made a change from the boredom of writing computer programs.) Invoices would be sent to me weekly from the university's main accounts office and all I really had to do was to make sure that they had been addressed to the right place in the internal mail system.

One day an invoice arrived for a maintenance contract on a piece of equipment we didn't use. We didn't use it because it didn't work and the people we had been paying for maintenance had told us that it could never be fixed because no parts were available. Into the bin it went.

A few days later I got a call from accounts "Where is invoice with the registration number XXX?". I told them that we didn't want to pay it and gave the reason.

At the end of the month accounts sent us a printout of the month's expenses, and there was payment of the invoice I'd rejected. When I asked why I was told that once an invoice had been registered into the system it had to be paid. The amount of money wasn't great but as a matter of principle we fought and eventually had the money credited back to our budget.

A few years later it was discovered that an employee of the accounts department had stolen well over a million dollars from the university by having a friend send official-looking invoices which were immediately approved for payment.