A ''multi-pronged'' identity fraud attack on the Australian Taxation Office early this year has led to the establishment of a new team of identity crime busters in the Tax Office.
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And the office has cautioned all users of social media that criminals attempted the scam using data harvested from a taxpayer's online activities.
Canberra's new Client Identity Unit, inspired by a similar outfit in the United States' Internal Revenue Service, was established in the wake of the attack and will support the Tax Office expansion of its e-services.
One of the office's second commissioners, Geoff Leeper, said the attack was detected and stopped and the loss of money had been minimal.
''We had to manage something early in the year, around January and February, which was a multi-pronged attempt on the tax revenue system,'' Mr Leeper said.
''As far as we're concerned it's closed, we identified the vector of attack and we dealt with it and we managed to stop nearly all the money they were trying to get out of us.
''We didn't get 100 per cent, but we got the vast majority of it once we identified the form of attack. All I'll say is that it started with the theft of an identity.''
The senior tax official said the attack was an example of how identities could be stolen using information that social media users posted online.
''The issue here is that people need to be incredibly cautious with their online identities,'' Mr Leeper said, ''and what we learned from that particular case was that there appears to be enough around on social media sites these days for it to be possible for someone who is not that careful to make it easier for someone to steal their identity.''
The new six-strong crime fighting unit will be based in the Tax Office corporate affairs division but be able to undertake tasks anywhere in Australia.
''One of the conclusions we drew was rather than manage these things on an incident-by-incident basis depending on who was around at the time, we would put a little bit of resources into a permanent staffing presence,'' Mr Leeper said.
''So what we've done with this client identity unit is try to bring together that capacity to respond rapidly.
''It might be individual cases of identity theft or it might be much more structured attempts on the tax system.''
Deepti Paton, of the Tax Institute, said the new unit was a ''welcome move''. ''Over the past few years there's been an increase year on year in identity fraud,'' Ms Paton said.
