Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday I received a fascinating but worrying report from IDCARE, Australia's national identity and cybersupport service, based at the University of the Sunshine Coast, which is in my electorate of Fisher. The report showed that in 2017 IDCARE responded to 123 incidents of cybercrime reported by my constituents. No doubt these figures are only the tip of the iceberg. Sixty-three per cent of the victims were female and, unfortunately, more than a third were older Australians.

The report also showed that financial institutions, government agencies and telecommunications companies could still be doing more to help people to identify cybercrime. Seventy-three per cent of my constituents who reported a cybercrime had been the first to detect the event, and it took them an average of 29.8 days to detect it. Their average loss was more than $16,700. It can't be right that my constituents can lose more than $16,000 to cybercrime and yet, 70 per cent of the time, none of the institutions which they rely on even notice anything untoward. We must do better. We should also explore ways to make these incidents easier for our constituents to deal with. The average resident of Fisher had to spend more than 17 hours contacting institutions to respond to these events.

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