The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, AUSTRAC, names Ghana in its 2022 risk assessment of remittance network providers, in two samples of suspicious matter reports. The United States appears on both lists too. These are samples of reports lodged by one Australian subsector, not a measure of money reaching any country.
The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, AUSTRAC, and the Bank of Ghana both publish fraud figures a reader is likely to meet when researching this corridor. They count different populations, and neither one counts money sent from Australia to Ghana. What each document actually measures is the useful answer.
Key Takeaways
- AUSTRAC's 2022 assessment of remittance network providers names Ghana in two samples of suspicious matter reports.
- The United States appears on both of the same lists, which is what tells you what the lists measure.
- AUSTRAC assesses the overall risk of that subsector as medium, with low-to-mid level offending dominating.
- The Bank of Ghana's 2025 fraud report records cases rising to 24,778, with the increase concentrated in payment service providers.
- Neither body publishes a figure for money sent from Australia to Ghana, and no such figure exists in either document.
What the Australian assessment says, precisely
It is a subsector assessment, and the distinction matters more than the country names in it.
AUSTRAC published a money laundering and terrorism financing risk assessment of remittance network providers and affiliates in Australia in 2022. It assesses the overall risk of that subsector as medium. The rating rests on the criminal threat environment, the subsector's inherent vulnerabilities, and the consequences associated with that threat. On the threat itself it records that low-to-mid level offending dominates, that organised crime groups are also present, and that most criminal misuse involves low-value transactions.
Ghana appears twice, in two different samples. A predicate offence is the crime the money is suspected of coming from.
| Sample | Rank among predicate offences | Countries the assessment names | Average value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fraud-related suspicious matter reports | second most commonly identified predicate offence in the sample, at 26 per cent | the Philippines, Nigeria, the USA, Ghana, South Africa | 7,200 Australian dollars |
| Scam-related suspicious matter reports | most commonly identified predicate offence in the sample, at 27 per cent | Nigeria, the USA, the Philippines, Ghana, China | 4,600 Australian dollars |
Where the types were discernible, it records investment scheme and identity fraud as the most common frauds, and romance, emergency funds and false billing scams as the most common scams. It adds one sentence about method that is worth quoting because it describes a pattern rather than a place: "Scam offenders usually provide victims with instructions to use a remitter to send funds offshore. The offender may instruct victims to make deposits into a domestic bank account that they control, which is then quickly remitted offshore."
Why the United States being on both lists is the important detail
Because it settles what kind of list this is.
A suspicious matter report is lodged with AUSTRAC by a business regulated under Australia's anti-money-laundering law when that business forms a suspicion about a transaction or a customer. It is a suspicion recorded by a reporting entity. It is not a finding, not a conviction and not a measurement of the transaction's actual character.
So a list of the countries appearing most often in a sample of those reports is a description of where Australian reporting entities have formed suspicions. It is shaped by transfer volume, by the mix of businesses lodging reports, and by which patterns those businesses are trained to notice. A list built that way counts reports, so a country that receives more transfers and generates more reports appears higher on it whatever the proportion of those transfers is legitimate. That is why the United States sits on both lists beside Ghana.
AUSTRAC also says the reporting is incomplete in a specific direction. A footnote to the fraud section records that its intelligence review understates the true extent of frauds affecting the subsector, because intelligence reporting usually details serious or organised criminal offending only and opportunistic, low-volume fraud activity generally is not reported.
What the Ghanaian regulator counts, and where it says the problem moved
The Bank of Ghana publishes an annual fraud report through its Financial Stability Department, covering the three regulated subsectors it supervises: banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions, and payment service providers.
Its 2025 report gives the totals directly. Reported fraud cases across the three subsectors rose from 16,733 in 2024 to 24,778 in 2025, while the total value at risk, meaning the money exposed rather than lost, rose from GH¢99 million to GH¢101 million in Ghanaian cedis. Over the four years from 2022 to 2025, cases rose from 15,164 to 24,778 and aggregate value at risk from GH¢82 million to GH¢101 million.
The composition underneath those totals moved in two directions at once.
- Banks recorded 472 fraud cases in 2025 against 716 in 2024, a decrease of 34 per cent, with the value at risk to banks down 24 per cent to GH¢57 million.
- Payment service providers recorded 24,124 electronic fraud incidents in 2025 against 15,673 in 2024, a rise of 54 per cent, with the value at risk at GH¢37 million against GH¢19 million, a rise of 95 per cent.
The report draws the conclusion itself: fraud activity has progressively migrated towards the payment service provider sector. It correlates that with rapid growth in transaction volumes and relatively lower levels of digital literacy among users, even though the same sector contributes significantly to financial inclusion.
That conclusion is about Ghana's domestic system. It says nothing about this corridor or about money arriving from abroad. Where an arriving remittance may be terminated is set by the Bank's own Notice No. BG/GOV/SEC/2025/25, the updated guidelines for inward remittance services: into a beneficiary's bank account, a mobile money wallet, or another electronic account or wallet the Bank has approved. Two of those three are payment service provider products, so the subsector the report locates the growth in is also the subsector an inward remittance is paid out through. That is an overlap between two facts, not a link the report makes, and this page does not make it either.
What neither document says
Neither publishes a figure for money sent from Australia to Ghana, or for fraud losses on that corridor. AUSTRAC's country lists come from samples of reports rather than from transaction totals by destination. The Bank of Ghana counts fraud inside Ghana's own institutions, without sorting it by where the money came from.
Two AUSTRAC documents are easily confused here. Its 2024 national risk assessment of money laundering, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's annual scam loss series, both report Australian losses without breaking them down by destination country. The document quoted in this guide is a different one: a subsector risk assessment of remittance network providers, where the country names come from samples of suspicious matter reports lodged by that subsector. It prints country names because it describes a sample of reports, not because it divides a loss total between destinations. Reading that list as though it were the breakdown missing from the first is the error to avoid.
One older Australian source is sometimes cited here, and it needs its date attached. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ran a Scam Disruption Project with the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce, using financial intelligence to identify Australians sending funds to West African nations and writing to them. It began in August 2014, and reported nearly 1,500 letters in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory over three months, around 60 per cent of recipients stopping for at least six weeks, and 72 per cent of those who made contact confirmed as scam victims. Read those figures for what they are. They cover one three-month window more than a decade ago, in two jurisdictions. The 72 per cent is counted among the people who chose to make contact, not among everyone written to, and everyone written to had been selected because they were already sending to the region, so the figures describe that group and not the corridor.
What a sender can actually take from all of this
Three things, and none of them is a probability.
The reporting duty is about the business, not the destination. A transfer to any destination may attract questions from the business handling it, because that business has obligations to form and record suspicions. Those obligations sit on the provider, not on the sender.
Nobody has published the number. Where a document is quoted as measuring this corridor, the useful question is which population it sampled and what it counted, because in both of the documents above the answer is something other than money moving between Australia and Ghana.
The last leg is the part Ghana's own rules do settle. Notice No. BG/GOV/SEC/2025/25 fixes where an arriving remittance may be paid out, and the Bank's supervisory guidance makes the Ghana Card the single document an institution uses to identify a customer. Those are questions with published answers, and they matter more to a transfer arriving next week than any fraud statistic does.
Where to look next
- Sending money to Myanmar: scam-centre reports - the same question on a corridor where United Nations reporting describes the operations directly, and where the Australian documents relied on are different ones from those used here.
- How international transfers work - the pillar guide on routes, checks and where transfers are held up.
- Converting Australian dollars to Ghanaian cedis - the currency page, on the Bank of Ghana's gold purchase programme and its inflation targeting framework.
- Remittance - the glossary entry for the term the Ghanaian termination rules are written around.
- Sending Australian dollars to Ghanaian cedis - the corridor page, with the cedi's own note and the live reference figures for the pair.
Sources
- AUSTRAC, Remittance network providers and affiliates in Australia: money laundering and terrorism financing risk assessment, 2022 - the medium overall risk rating and the description of the threat environment, the fraud and scam samples of suspicious matter reports with their country lists and average values, the description of how scam offenders instruct victims to use a remitter, and the footnote recording that the intelligence review understates opportunistic low-volume fraud
- Bank of Ghana, Financial Stability Department, Banks, SDIs and PSPs 2025 Fraud Report - the totals for 2024 and 2025 and the four-year series, the split between banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions and payment service providers, and the report's own conclusion that fraud activity has migrated towards the payment service provider sector
- Bank of Ghana, Notice No. BG/GOV/SEC/2025/25, Updated Guidelines for Inward Remittance Services by Payment Service Providers, 25 August 2025 - the three permitted places an inward remittance may be terminated
- Bank of Ghana, Supervisory Guidance Note on the use of the Ghana Card - the requirement that accountable institutions identify and verify customers on that card alone
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Scamwatch, ACCC updates on scam disruption project - the 2014 project run with the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce, the use of financial intelligence to identify Australians sending funds to West African nations, and the letter, cessation and confirmed-victim figures
General information about sending money to Ghana, and about what two named regulators have published and what their documents measure. Not financial advice, and not a statement about any particular transfer, recipient or country. Reviewed by the Tradergy editorial team, September 2026.
Common questions
Which Australian body publishes on this and what does it say?
The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), in its 2022 money laundering and terrorism financing risk assessment of remittance network providers and affiliates in Australia. Ghana appears twice, in two different samples of suspicious matter reports. In the fraud sample the assessment states that most suspicious transactions involved the Philippines, Nigeria, the USA, Ghana and South Africa, with associated values averaging 7,200 Australian dollars. In the scam sample it states that most suspicious transactions involved Nigeria, the USA, the Philippines, Ghana and China, with values averaging 4,600 Australian dollars.
Does that mean money sent to Ghana is likely to be a scam?
The document does not support that reading and its own composition argues against it. The United States is on both lists. What the lists describe is which countries appear most often in a sample of reports lodged by one Australian subsector about transactions it found suspicious, which is a measure of reporting rather than of money. AUSTRAC assesses the overall risk of that subsector as medium, and describes the criminal threat environment as dominated by low-to-mid level offending.
What is a suspicious matter report?
A report a business regulated under Australia's anti-money-laundering law lodges with AUSTRAC when it forms a suspicion about a transaction or a customer. It is a suspicion, not a finding, and it is filed by the business rather than by the customer. A country appearing often in a sample of them tells you where reporting entities have formed suspicions, not what proportion of transfers to that country are improper.
What does the Bank of Ghana publish?
An annual fraud report covering the three regulated subsectors it supervises: banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions and payment service providers. Its 2025 report records total reported fraud cases rising from 16,733 in 2024 to 24,778 in 2025, with total value at risk rising from GH¢99 million to GH¢101 million. It records banks moving the other way, with 472 cases in 2025 against 716 in 2024.
Do either of them publish how much Australian money reaches Ghana?
No. AUSTRAC's country lists are drawn from samples of reports rather than from transaction totals by destination, and the Bank of Ghana's report counts fraud inside Ghana's own regulated institutions without reference to where money originated. There is no published figure for fraud losses on the Australia to Ghana corridor specifically, and any number presented as one would be an inference rather than a published measure.