With millions of IDs exposed in the Optus data breach, many Australians are now having to replace their cards and passports to ensure criminals can’t use them for fraud and theft.
And with the Prime Minister confirming on Friday that Optus, and not taxpayers, would at least pay for the new passports, how far could Optus go to clean up the mess?
Replacement passports are taking months to arrive as it is, which is unlikely to improve after the Optus breach. Credit:iStock
Estimating these numbers requires a fair amount of guesswork and guesswork, given the lack of solid details about what data was stolen. Up to 9.8 million Australians are believed to have had their personal data compromised in the breach, but only about 3 million had identity documents such as passports or driving licenses exposed and 37,000 Medicare numbers.
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It’s impossible to say at this stage how many individual documents Optus would have to pay to replace, especially given that some people would only have produced a passport or license and not both, and some of the data is likely to be out of date. But let’s assume an extreme outcome where the telco had to pay to replace 3 million passports, 3 million driver’s licenses and 15,000 Medicare cards (22,000 of the exposed numbers were expired).
Licenses are easy to calculate as they cost an average of about $27 to replace depending on your state, assuming it wouldn’t cost more to change the numbers and assuming Optus couldn’t arrange some sort of bulk discount, the final price comes . to 81 million dollars.
Passports are a bit more complicated. They usually cost $193 to replace, but can be free in certain situations, so it’s unclear what the actual replacement cost would be in this scenario. So at most it’s $580 million, but in all likelihood it would be much lower after Optus resolves the issue with the relevant department and you subtract the customers whose passport information was not included or was not up to date.
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