RUBY:

Emma could you maybe just start by just telling me a little bit about it yourself?

EMMA:

So, I am a photographer and I'm my oh, sorry, I don't, I don't really know. Yeah…

So I'm a photographer living in Melbourne and wrote recently about my experience of having my identity stolen.

RUBY:

Yeah thank you. I know it must be a bit weird to be asked who you are in the context of explaining how your identity was taken from you?

EMMA:

Yeah the experience of talking about having lost my identity and just like, all of this online and it all happening in the pandemic. It's just like, so surreal.

RUBY:

Yeah, I can understand that. And I don’t know if this is a conscious thing or not, and I don’t want to read too much into it, but I did notice that when you introduced yourself, you didn’t actually say your name?

EMMA:

Yeah, no. I just, I, I think I still feel a little bit uncomfortable in this like, like publicly speaking about this. It does feel kind of exposing. I just felt so watched and surveilled that I'm just really conscious about doing by talking about this publicly.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

It’s been two weeks since millions of Australians learned their data might have been compromised in the Optus hack. Since then, other data breaches have been revealed and the precarious nature of the way our personal information is often stored is becoming clear.

So, what actually happens when someone tries to steal your identity?

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper, Emma Phillips on how it feels to lost control of your identity, and her fight to get it back.

It’s Thursday October 20.

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RUBY:

Emma, you wrote about the experience of having your identity stolen. Could you take me back to the first thing that happened? What was the beginning of that to you?

EMMA:

So I guess it probably started with a burglary. At the time I was living in Melbourne, it was a few months into the pandemic and I was living with my boyfriend at the time, and a housemate.

I woke up in the morning and had a call from the CommBank Fraud Department, and as I was walking around on the phone to this representative from The Commbank, I started to see signs that we had most certainly been burgled. …There’d been people in our house while we had been asleep, a few items were stolen including my car licence.

And then a few months later, I received an email from a bank that I bank with. And it was informing me that my details of my bank account had been updated. And I was just really suspicious about that. And so I called them immediately.

And while I was on the phone to them, actually, I logged on to Internet banking and I could see that my phone number had changed and was an unfamiliar phone number, and I could see that it was an unfamiliar email address… but when I was connected to a representative from the bank, they just changed my details back, and then they launched a fraud investigation.

The next day someone from the bank called me and let me know that someone had actually called up with all of the correct identification details and then changed all of my details. So I guess that was probably the first event that caused me to sort of think, Oh, that's really strange. I had just assumed that it was some sort of cyber hacking up until that point.

RUBY:

So, at first it seemed like this was a kind of generic hacking, not necessarily targeted at you. When did you start to realise the full extent of what was happening?

EMMA:

So I guess when I began to realise the extent of the attempts to gain access to my account was when I went into CommBank and asked them if there were any attempts to gain access to my account and when I was talking to the teller.
And she was like, ‘Oh, yeah, actually, somebody tried to gain access to your account yesterday in Point Cook. Was that you?...’ And then she mentioned, the bank teller mentioned, the only reason that the money wasn't withdrawn, was that the licence was expired at that time.

All of a sudden my just kind of heart sunk, and I realised that this was actually something quite serious and that this wasn't just some routine data breach that was occurring online. It was more targeted and more specific to me and my identity, I guess, or, you know, whatever an identity means.

And I guess in the few hours after that, the whole kind of thing began to unravel.

RUBY:

How did it all begin to unravel? What happened next?

EMMA:

So, from that point onwards it was yeah, it was really each day for about a two week period, there were just more attempts to gain access to a really broad range of accounts. So my Medicare account was a really big one, VicRoads, there were multiple attempts to take out credit in my name, and various accounts had been opened in my name with, you know, Car Next Door, Latitude Pay, Wise Out Finance, just various organisations. That I didn't have accounts with them.

I was spending days at a time trying to claim back all of the accounts that had been compromised. It was like Groundhog Day, I would just be on hold on the phone, waiting to contact Medicare, waiting to contact VicRoads, or Australia Post. So, it was really overwhelming the number of tasks I had to undergo in terms of having to reclaim my identity
People were calling up, pretending to be me and ordering new cards online, and then they were also going into VicRoads branches and impersonating me, trying to get new licences as well. And there was this sense that I had that there were many organisations that didn't really have structures or procedures in place to protect my information
That was something that I was continuously concerned about because I was having to call up and check each day, or a few days, if there had been more attempts to access my accounts.

RUBY:

Right so at this point Emma, what did you see as your options?

EMMA:

I mean, I didn't really feel like I had a lot of options, I suppose. The police were not very helpful in my experience. Obviously I reported a cybercrime which one is able to do online, but nobody would give me a police report. But I was in such a conundrum because I wasn’t able to prove the fraud had taken place, in order to get a new driver’s licence number I had to get a police report.

So there was very little help that was available, and I began to feel like I was like some agent investigating myself, which was also a surreal feeling, I think, at the time I don't know whether I would say that I felt like a victim, but I definitely felt extremely exposed and alone.

Like, I could objectively realise that and understand that the point of the crimes were to extract as much capital as possible. But I began to realise just how much information they had about me and how much they knew about me. I knew nothing about them.

I work as a photographer and I'm used to watching other people, and all of a sudden I felt like I was being watched and there was no start and end point of that feeling. It was just continuous. And I felt, quite frankly, I felt scared.

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RUBY:

Emma, after having your identity compromised in this way, after having a person, or multiple people, try to impersonate you, steal your money and take out accounts in your name... How has this changed the way you interact with the world, both as your online and offline self?

EMMA:

I definitely feel differently and I definitely behave differently as well. Like, I don't allow a lot of people to have my phone number. And I have a shadow email address, I use an email address that is separate for all of my accounts that people don't know. It's probably kind of strange, but I just felt that if people know your email address, like that's constantly used as a username for a lot of online accounts. And I guess the thing about identity theft is if you gain access to one account, then that's just like they're collecting information on you.

And so I felt, I think, extremely vulnerable. I ordered shattered shutters from my house, and I got a new back fence. I really, like, increased my security. But I still and to this day, I still feel unsafe.

RUBY:

And at one point you even considered going to the lengths of changing your name?

EMMA:

Yeah, I did feel that way I did consider in the depths of my despair, if I should perhaps change my name. And I did wonder and have wondered since, like, what does make up an identity? That's something I consider as well.

So yeah, I didn't end up changing my name, but I pretty much changed everything else. I think that once you lose aspects of your identity, then you're never able to really get anything back. Which is ultimately why I do consider changing my name. I did feel at the time, and still feel actually, that that perhaps is one way to ensure that the fraud would stop.

RUBY:

And it sounds like you've essentially given up on the idea of actually finding out whose done it and pursuing it in any way.

EMMA:

I don't think it's a possibility. I don't think I'll ever know who the personal people were that were trying to access my accounts.

And in light of, you know, the multiple data breaches that have taken place in recent weeks, I just think that people don't really understand how at risk they are from something as small as a driver's licence. It just can cause so much grief and pain when it ends up in the wrong hands and I don't really want to be known as somebody whose identity was stolen.

But in speaking about this, you know, to a wider audience, I do feel that hopefully it can help people. And I know that when that I went through this, there was very little resources available. So I hope that in due course that will change and more people will become aware of the potential risks.

RUBY:

And Emma after all of this – after changing your ID documents, and your details and your passwords with all these different institutions…. Just a couple of weeks ago, you got an email from Optus, didn’t you?

EMMA:

Well Yeah. So, I haven't had an account with Optus since 2014, but I did receive an email saying that my driver's licence had been. Had been lost in the Optus hack…

RUBY:

That must have just felt awful.

EMMA:

It was definitely concerning. I mean it was my old driver's licence number, so I guess my fears were kind of parlayed a little bit. But I'm concerned for other people not really understanding perhaps the extent of grief this sort of information loss can eventually cause.

RUBY:

Emma, thank you so much for talking to me about all of this and I know it can’t have been easy.

EMMA:

Thanks Ruby, appreciate that.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Immigration minister Andrew Giles, yesterday, declared that temporary protection visas for refugees are “cruel” and undermine a “fair go”.

Labor promised before the election to end the temporary nature of refugee protection visas, but so far has not enacted an alternative.

And Pauline Hanson has been ordered to pay $250,000 dollars in damages to her former One Nation colleague Brian Burston.

The judge ruled Hanson had defamed him in a television interview, after he had left the party, where she accused him of sexual abuse and other harassment.

However, the judge found that in two of the eight imputations, there was evidence to establish that Burston had sexually harassed a former colleague by sexually propositioning her, and had sexually harassed a second staffer over "a prolonged period".

Im Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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