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A woman from the New South Wales Hunter Valley is fighting to get her identity back, six months after a fraudster racked up more than a dozen loan applications in her name.
'Julie' has told the ABC she had suspected something was amiss when her local postie alerted her to anomalies with her mail.
"Because I live in a very, very small community a letter from Telstra came to an address that I lived at the last time I held an account with Telstra," Julie said.
"Because they knew me they delivered it to my existing post box.
"I've opened it up and I've gone I don't have an account with Telstra and that was a catalyst to a living hell.
"It was nothing more than sheer luck that I found out."
'Like a bad movie'
Julie said her identity was stolen, via her drivers' licence, and since then 18 loan applications had been made in her name, one for $10,000.
She said the more she learned, the more sick she felt.
"In the middle of the night I wondered what was going to come at me next," she said.
"I am a highly intelligent, confident woman and yet this has really drained me.
"It is absolutely like a bad movie."
Julie said her credit rating had almost halved to 530 since and until she can prove she is a victim of crime she cannot get a new drivers' licence.
"In New South Wales you can't change your drivers licence number unless you change your identity," she said.
Federal MP calls for reform in wake of ID theft
Julie's local federal politician, member for Paterson Meryl Swanson raised the case in parliament and called for tougher rules to stop people applying for credit in other people's names.
"The applications were all done online," Ms Swanson said.
"You do not even have to go into a bank or provide any physical evidence — just a drivers' licence number and you can fudge the rest.
"Julie has been told by those in the know that a drivers' licence is now the most powerful form of ID you have and the most likely to be stolen.
"Banks have dedicated fraud teams to deal with this, but still they seem to lend without adequate proof of identity.
"Julie believes organisations such as Telstra and these big banks are not moving quickly enough.
"They are not keeping up with the cyber-criminals and they are not doing enough to restore the credit rating of victims so they can get on with their lives.
For Julie reform cannot come soon enough.
"The whole way it was me having to prove I didn't make those applications," she said.
"I found this was very frustrating that this could be done online.
"I think that credit providers need to be held a lot more accountable because of the ease of these online applications."
Police estimate fraud costs billions
The Australian Federal Police said each year people lost hundreds of millions of dollars through ID fraud.
The AFP said recent estimates by the Attorney-General's Department found that identity crime cost Australia upwards of $1.6 billion each year, with the majority (around $900m) lost by individuals through credit card fraud, identity theft, and scams.
"More alarmingly, identity crime continues to be a key enabler of serious and organised crime, which in turn costs Australia around $15 billion annually," the AFP said.
On its website it said, "the AFP, in collaboration with other government departments and private sector organisations, is involved in a variety of activities to tackle identity theft and identity crime."
Topics: fraud-and-corporate-crime, banking, federal-government, maitland-2320