Lost your wallet — the order to do things in

Open your banking app before you do anything else. Every major Australian bank now has a lock or freeze control on each card, and locking is not the same as cancelling — it stops the card being used while leaving it alive if the wallet reappears under a car seat. Service NSW's guidance is to contact your financial institution so the cards can be locked or cancelled, and the app does that in seconds where a phone queue does not. Do it for every card in the wallet, including the ones you never use, because those are the ones nobody notices going missing.

Then decide which cards to kill outright. If the wallet was stolen, or you have no idea where it went, cancel rather than lock. The cost of cancelling is administrative — new numbers, and a round of updating direct debits — and Service NSW specifically flags the follow-up job of updating any payments you make automatically once new account numbers arrive. The cost of not cancelling is a card sitting in someone else's pocket with contactless enabled.

The reason speed matters is legal, not only practical. ASIC administers the ePayments Code, which applies to consumer electronic payment transactions including ATM, EFTPOS and credit card transactions, online payments, internet and mobile banking, and BPAY, and which ASIC describes as setting the rules for determining who pays for unauthorised transactions. Those rules turn on what you did and when you did it. Reporting promptly is the single fact most within your control, and the protections apply only where your provider is a subscriber to the Code — ASIC publishes the subscriber list.

Deal with the digital wallet at the same time. If your phone was in the same bag, the cards in Apple Pay or Google Wallet are separate tokens from the plastic and need suspending separately, and the phone itself is the second factor for myGov, your bank and your email. Cancelling the plastic while leaving a signed-in phone in a stranger's hands is the worst combination available.

Now sweep the smaller balances. Transport cards, prepaid cards, gift cards and any store card with stored value are all money, and most are only recoverable if they were registered to your name beforehand. Service NSW lists transport cards among the replacements it handles for exactly this reason. Unregistered stored value is generally gone; registered value can usually be transferred to a replacement card.

Write down what was in the wallet while you can still remember. You will be asked to list it — by police, by an insurer, and by whichever agency is reissuing a document — and the list you make in the first hour is far more accurate than the one you make on day three. Service NSW's preventative advice is to scan or photocopy everything in your wallet and update the copy every few months, which is exactly the document you wish you had at this point.

Report a stolen wallet to police, and do it through the online channel rather than by driving to a station. Service NSW directs people to the NSW Police Force Community Portal and explains why in one sentence: the police report provides a formal record in case of identity theft further down the track. Victoria Police runs an equivalent online reporting service for non-urgent crimes and events, and publishes 131 444 as its round-the-clock non-emergency number. Every state and territory police service operates something similar under a different name.

What you are actually collecting is a reference. Depending on the jurisdiction it is called an event number, a report number or a police reference number, and it is the thing other organisations ask for when they want evidence that a loss was reported rather than invented. Transport WA states the point bluntly for licences: once you have a WA Police report number you are eligible for a free certified copy of your licence, and it will not accept an interstate or overseas theft report for that purpose. Write the number somewhere you will still have it in six months.

Do not report a theft that was not a theft. A police report is a statement, and the difference between losing a wallet at the beach and having it taken from a bag is a difference police care about. If you genuinely do not know, say so — the report can record property as lost. What you should not do is invent a theft in order to qualify for a free replacement, because the free replacement is conditioned on the report and the report is a legal document.

Report the loss to police even when the wallet was only lost if it contained a birth certificate, a citizenship certificate, a passport or anything else that establishes who you are rather than merely identifying you. Those documents have a second life in the identity market long after the cash is gone, and the report is what dates your loss if a fraudulent account is opened next year. It costs nothing and takes about ten minutes online.

Keep the report and the wallet inventory together in one place, digitally. Every subsequent conversation — with the bank's disputes team, with a registry, with an insurer, with a road authority counter — starts with the same three questions: what was taken, when, and did you report it. Having a single document with the date, the reference number and the list turns each of those conversations from ten minutes into two.

Finally, check whether anything in the wallet identified where you live. A licence, a rates notice, a rego paper or a spare key with an address tag turns a property loss into a household security problem. This is the point at which people change a lock rather than the point at which they wish they had, and the cost of doing it early is trivial next to the alternative.

Licensing is state and territory business, so there are eight processes and no national one. The myGov page on replacing stolen identity documents is explicit about this: it tells you to replace the licence if both the card number and the licence number have been compromised, notes that you may not need to if only the licence number was exposed, and then sends you to your state or territory government for the actual transaction. That handoff is why a single national instruction does not exist.

The distinction myGov is pointing at is the one that makes replacement worth doing at all. Service NSW explains it directly: when you replace your licence, your driver licence number remains the same but your card number changes. The card number is what an organisation checks against the Document Verification Service to confirm the plastic is real, so a new card number invalidates the old card for identity checks even though your licence number is unchanged. Replacing the card is therefore a genuine security step, not only a convenience.

In New South Wales the replacement is done online through a MyServiceNSW Account or in person at a Service NSW Centre with form 1018. Service NSW blocks the online route in several situations — if your address changed in the last fourteen days, if you already replaced online within the last twelve months, if you are applying for a Photo Card at the same time, or if the licence is suspended, cancelled, disqualified or expired. Online, you can download the NSW Digital Driver Licence or print an interim paper licence immediately, and the card arrives within fifteen business days. Service NSW's number is 13 77 88.

Victoria splits the job between two bodies. Service Victoria lists licence replacement among its transport and driving services but hands the transaction itself to VicRoads, where it is completed through a myVicRoads account. Queensland is the most flexible of the eight: the Queensland Government publishes online and in-person options and lists a police station as one of the places you can lodge a replacement, alongside customer service centres and government offices, with the Queensland Digital Licence app covering you while the card is in the post. Queensland also publishes a separate free replacement pathway for victims of crime, and its general enquiry line is 13 QGOV (13 74 68).

Western Australia is the jurisdiction that puts a number on it. Transport WA offers three routes — online through a DoTDirect account, in person at a DTMI service centre, or by post with the DL26 form, certified identity copies and payment — and publishes a replacement fee of $33.30 online. It waives that fee entirely where you produce a WA Police report number for a stolen licence, where you hold a full fee concession, or where documents were damaged in a declared emergency. It also refuses replacement outright if you are prohibited from driving, suspended, cancelled or facing pending charges.

South Australia routes licences through Service SA, reachable on 13 10 84 between 8am and 6pm on weekdays, either online or at a customer service centre — the Community Legal Centres SA guidance on replacing lost documents sets this out alongside the separate numbers for certificates and concession cards, which is a useful reminder that in SA the licence and the birth certificate are handled by different agencies entirely.

Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory are smaller operations with the same shape. Tasmanian replacements go through Service Tasmania, and IDCARE's Tasmanian fact sheet documents something most jurisdictions bury: where your identity has been compromised you can apply for an entirely new driver licence number, not merely a new card, supported by a statutory declaration, proof of identity and evidence of address, through [email protected]. The ACT replaces online or at an Access Canberra Service Centre using an Application for Replacement form, with [email protected] as the contact point for identity-compromise cases. The Northern Territory works through the Motor Vehicle Registry, with some transactions available at post offices, requiring evidence of identity and residency, and [email protected] as the written contact.

One warning that applies everywhere: do not let the replacement lapse into a renewal by accident, and do not assume a replacement resets an expiry date. A replacement gives you the same licence on a new card. If your licence was close to expiring anyway, ask whether renewing is cheaper than replacing, because in several jurisdictions it is, and you end up with a longer validity for a similar fee.

The Medicare card is the easiest replacement in the wallet and the one people worry about most. myGov states plainly that if your Medicare card details were stolen or exposed you can get a free replacement Medicare card through Services Australia, and that the replacement is ordered online where Medicare is linked to your myGov account. There is no charge and no proof-of-loss requirement in the ordinary case.

You do not need the physical card to be treated in the meantime. myGov points to a digital Medicare card available in the myGov app wallet, which practices and pharmacies accept in the same way as the plastic. Failing that, a receptionist can generally look you up from your name, date of birth and address, or you can pay and claim the rebate afterwards. Losing the card does not suspend your Medicare enrolment; it is a card, not the entitlement.

Concession cards issued by Services Australia — the Pensioner Concession Card, the Health Care Card, the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card — are replaced through the same channel as Medicare, and in South Australia the Community Legal Centres guidance gives 132 307 as the phone route for Medicare and concession cards together, with temporary cards available at relief centres for people in urgent need after a disaster. If your entitlement is current, the replacement is a reprint, not a reassessment.

State Seniors Cards are separate again, and each state runs its own. Service NSW replaces a lost, stolen or destroyed NSW Seniors Card online through a MyServiceNSW Account, or on 13 77 88, or at a Service NSW Centre, with the replacement arriving within twenty-one working days and a digital version available in the Service NSW app in the meantime. In South Australia the Seniors Card line is 1800 819 961, replacements are free, and any balance on the card is transferred across automatically.

Transport cards deserve five minutes of your attention because they hold real money. The rule across the Australian networks is the same in substance: if the card was registered to your account before it went missing, the balance can be protected and moved to a replacement; if it was an anonymous card bought over the counter, the stored value goes with it. Service NSW lists transport concession entitlement cards and Opal cards among the replacements it handles, which tells you where to start in that state.

Work and licence cards are the last group and the ones most likely to cost you a shift. A Working With Children Check in New South Wales is a clearance attached to a number rather than a piece of plastic — the Office of the Children's Guardian publishes a Find My Number tool for exactly this situation, and your employer verifies the number online rather than inspecting a card. Responsible service of alcohol and gaming competency cards, construction cards, firearms licences and driver authorities are all replaceable through the same state service that issued them, and Service NSW lists them all in its wallet guide.

A birth certificate in a lost wallet is a different order of problem from a lost bank card, because it is a breeder document — the thing other identity documents are built from. It is also the item most likely to have been in the wallet for a mundane reason, such as a rental application or a passport lodgement, and least likely to be noticed missing for weeks.

Certificates are registry business, and every state and territory runs its own Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. You apply to the registry of the state where the event was registered, not the state where you now live, which is why interstate applications are routine. Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria sets out the shape of it: you prove your identity either online with two identity documents, one from each of two categories with at least one carrying a photo, or with certified copies — two Category 1 documents, or three from different categories — and the registry publishes a legal certificate price of $59.10 with express domestic postage at $10.60 and a processing time of up to fourteen days once the documents arrive.

That pricing and timing is Victorian and should not be read across. Every registry sets its own fee, its own identity table and its own turnaround, and several run a priority or express service. In South Australia certificates sit with Consumer and Business Services on 131 882 rather than with the licensing agency, and Community Legal Centres SA notes that people affected by a declared natural disaster qualify for a priority service for replacement certificates. In New South Wales the Registry handles birth, marriage and death certificates and Service NSW acts as the front door for the application.

The step almost nobody knows about is blocking. ID Support NSW — the New South Wales identity recovery service — publishes guidance covering fourteen document types, and states that certain documents including Australian birth and marriage certificates can be blocked through the Document Verification Service so they cannot be used as proof of identity. That is the mechanism that stops the certificate in a stranger's hands from being turned into a licence, a bank account or a passport. It is free, it is fast, and it is the single most valuable phone call in this whole page if a certificate is genuinely gone. ID Support NSW takes calls on 1800 001 040 from 9am to 5pm on weekdays.

Blocking is not the same as replacing, and you generally want both. The block kills the credential; the replacement gives you a usable document with a new number. Do them in that order, because a replacement issued while the old certificate is still verifiable leaves two live documents in the world, only one of which you hold. ID Support NSW frames the whole exercise as limiting the fraudulent use of your identity through quick action, and the sequencing is the practical expression of that.

Change-of-name documents, marriage certificates and divorce orders sit in the same category and are replaced the same way, through the registry that registered the event. If your identity trail runs through several names, replace the documents that join them up rather than only the current one — a passport or citizenship application will ask for the whole chain, and discovering a missing link at the counter is what turns a six-week process into a six-month one.

If an Australian passport was in the wallet, report it. myGov's guidance is that physical theft of an Australian passport must be reported immediately, and draws a clear line between that and a data breach — a passport whose number was exposed in a breach remains valid for travel, and cancelling or replacing it is optional protection rather than an obligation. A passport that has physically left your possession is the first case, not the second.

The reporting number is the Australian Passport Information Service, and Community Legal Centres SA lists it as 131 232 in its guidance on replacing lost documents, alongside the point that people affected by declared disasters may receive replacements at no cost. Report first and apply second: a lost or stolen passport is cancelled on report, and once cancelled it cannot be used again even if it turns up the next day, which is precisely the protection you are asking for.

The consequence for your travel plans is that a replacement is a full new application rather than a renewal, with the referee or guarantor requirement and the original documents that implies. That is covered end to end in how-to-get-an-australian-passport, and if the loss happened overseas the process runs through an Australian embassy, high commission or consulate instead. Do not book non-refundable travel against a passport that has not arrived.

A foreign passport is not an Australian problem to solve. myGov's instruction is to contact the issuing country's embassy or consulate in Australia, which will run its own reporting, cancellation and replacement process on its own timeline. Start that conversation early, because consular processing times for a replacement national passport are frequently longer than the Australian equivalent and are not something any Australian agency can accelerate.

Immigration documents — an ImmiCard, a certificate of evidence of immigration status, or a citizenship certificate — are Commonwealth documents replaced through the Department of Home Affairs, and ID Support NSW lists citizenship certificates, ImmiCards and visas among the fourteen document types it helps people recover and protect. Your visa itself is digital and attached to your passport number rather than to a card, so a lost card does not disturb your visa status; the card is evidence of it, and evidence is what you are replacing.

Two practical points close this out. First, replacing a citizenship certificate takes weeks and it is a prerequisite for a passport application, so if both were in the wallet the certificate is the critical path and should be lodged the same week. Second, keep every reference number the reporting calls generate — the passport report, the Home Affairs application, the police event number — in the same file. The identity documents are the ones you will be asked to account for in a year's time, not the debit card.

Cancelling the cards ends the immediate loss. It does nothing about the second, slower loss, which is somebody using your documents to open accounts in your name. The defence against that is a credit ban, and it is a statutory right rather than a favour. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner sets out the mechanics: a ban lasts twenty-one days from your request, it costs nothing, and the credit reporting body must notify you at least five business days before it expires so that you can decide whether to extend.

Place the ban with all three credit reporting bodies — Equifax, Experian and illion — or ask one to pass the request to the other two, which the OAIC confirms is an option. While a ban is in force the credit reporting body cannot use or disclose your credit report except with your written consent or where law or a court order requires it, and any credit provider making an enquiry is told the ban exists, which flags the application as a possible fraud. The trade-off is real and worth naming: it also makes legitimate credit harder to obtain while the ban runs.

Extensions are not capped. The OAIC states that a ban can be extended more than once with no limit, and that a credit reporting body must extend it where it believes you have been, or are likely to be, a victim of fraud, notifying you in writing of the length. If your documents are actually in circulation, keep extending rather than letting the ban lapse and hoping. Lifting the ban later is an online form.

IDCARE is the free national identity and cyber support service, and it is the right call when the loss is more than a card — a birth certificate, a passport, a licence and a Medicare card taken together, or any suspicion that documents are being used. myGov names IDCARE as a free identity and cyber support service that can give support and advice tailored to your circumstances, and the value is that a case manager builds a response plan across every organisation involved rather than leaving you to work out the order yourself. IDCARE's Australian line is 1800 595 160.

In New South Wales, ID Support NSW does the equivalent job for state-issued credentials and does one thing IDCARE cannot: it arranges the blocking and reissue of documents held in NSW systems, and it covers fourteen document types from birth and marriage certificates through to veteran cards and student identification. If any of your documents were issued in New South Wales, call 1800 001 040 as well, not instead.

Where the misuse of your identity has crossed into Commonwealth offences, a Commonwealth Victims' Certificate exists. The Legal Services Commission of South Australia's Law Handbook describes it as a document a victim of Commonwealth identity crime can present to organisations, and one that may help you negotiate with banks and other financial institutions to re-establish your credentials or have fraudulent transactions removed from records. The same source is clear about its limits: it will not automatically restore your credit rating. It is a supporting document in a negotiation, not a remedy in itself.

Then set a reminder for three months out and check your credit report and your myGov inbox. Fraud built on stolen documents rarely surfaces in week one, because the useful documents are sold on rather than used immediately. If something has been opened in your name, our sibling guide what-to-do-if-your-identity-is-stolen sets out the full recovery sequence, and this page's job — locking the money down, replacing each document, blocking the credentials behind them — is the work that makes that sequence short rather than long.