The most insidious messages Angela MacMillan’s team sees are not the ones filled with swear words. The ones that raise the biggest red flags often look harmless to an outsider. To a victim, they’re a warning: I’m watching you. 

MacMillan’s team is responsible for identifying threats or abuse hidden in CommBank’s transaction descriptions – the 35 or so characters that accompany money transfers in digital banking apps. 

“It’s things like, ‘You looked amazing at the train station today’, or ‘I always like you in that purple dress’, or ‘I love you’,” said MacMillan, who is Group Customer Advocate for the major lender. She joined FW podcast There’s No Place Like Home: Paths to Healing to discuss how rapidly evolving technology can help in the fight against tech and financial abuse. 

Another recent trend she’s seen doesn’t involve words at all. 

“We’re seeing more emojis being used in transaction descriptions. And if you’ve watched Adolescence you know there is a whole lexicon to certain emojis in certain patterns. [So we’re] building out our technology to be able to identify those.” 

CommBank was first warned in 2019 that its digital payment platforms were being misused by perpetrators. The revelation prompted banks across the country to take steps to address the practice, including explicitly banning it in their terms and conditions.

In December 2025, CommBank announced it had blocked over one million transactions. MacMillan says much has changed since that first warning – including the advent of artificial intelligence, which the bank is harnessing to detect potentially worrying messages. 

“We built an AI model which runs over our transactions and identifies, based on a whole number of parameters, high-risk matters that then go through our Next Chapter team for human eyes and then some human responses,” MacMillan told the FW podcast.

MacMillan was joined by Pip Rae, a survivor-strategist who uses her lived experience of tech abuse, her decades as a police officer and her work in the eSafety Commission to train frontline responders like police to better understand and identify technology-facilitated abuse. The ubiquity of technology in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, she says, is a weapon perpetrators can readily harness.

“In a strange way, [we’re] thinking like a perpetrator to come up with solutions.”

“You get the latest tech but you don’t realise how it can be weaponised because there’s so much trust. Even for me, I found out a lot about it after my marriage ended. When you’re trying to work out where things are at you start to see how many elements inside your house, right down to garage door keys were missing, baby monitors in the house… Everything becomes a little bit suspicious.” 

Rae believes one solution is for systems, including banks, to actively identify the loopholes perpetrators manipulate. 

“I had a client who was shopping [and] has had access to [her] account for over two or three years during their relationship and suddenly she doesn’t. He’s been able to call to say, ‘Please take her off the account’. So it’s about putting these checking mechanisms back in,” said Rae. 

While MacMillan agrees that technology – including AI – brings many benefits, she believes human oversight remains the key.

“In a strange way, [we’re] thinking like a perpetrator to come up with solutions. [It’s about asking] what do we need to do here? I think you can potentially miss that if you’re [only] relying on technology.”