NSW government stands up dedicated unit to fight identity theft

The New South Wales government has established a dedicated unit that will provide support for citizens who have had their personal information or government proof of identity credentials stolen or fraudulently obtained.

The new unit, known as IDSupport NSW, will become the single point of call for citizens who have had their identity stolen. It will work with other NSW government departments and Australia and New Zealand’s national identity and cyber support service, IDCare, to mitigate the risk of stolen personal information being used for identity crimes and replace compromised identity documents where appropriate.

“IDSupport NSW will for the first time provide a single point-of-contact for citizens who have had their identity compromised, while ensuring we have a coordinated end-to-end privacy incident response service in NSW Government,” Minister for Digital and Customer Service Victor Dominello said.

“The unit will remove the burden from customers who need to replace identification documents, improving their experience at what we know can be a difficult time.”

The state government added IDSupport NSW would also provide citizens with options for additional support, such as counselling services, and deliver education and awareness campaigns about personal cybersecurity and identity resilience together with Cyber Security NSW and other government agencies.

The Department of Customer Service is now recruiting experts to join IDSupport NSW, which is due to be launched early next year. 

The launch of IDSupport NSW forms part of the NSW government’s identity strategy [PDF] and follows on from recommendations made by the Parliamentary Inquiry into Cyber Security released earlier this year.

Back in 2019, the NSW government’s Cyber Security NSW arm established IDCare Identity Recovery Service to help state government customers whose identities are compromised due to a “cyber incident”.

The service, at the time, was only available for up to 500 individual referrals by NSW government departments and agencies to IDCare.

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