Victorian Game Authority inadvertently emailed customer data to hunters

The personal data of customers at a Victorian hunting authority has inadvertently been emailed out to strangers renewing their hunting licences.

Victorian Game Management Authority customer data was sent to eight people renewing their game licences, with the state Department of Environment Land Water and Planning blaming “human error” for the lapse.

The eight customers who received the emails have been contacted, and the department is confident the personal data has either been deleted or was never received due to the file size.

The actions of the Game Management Authority follow a similar, but much larger, instance of the National Australia Bank sending the details of approximately 60,000 customers to an email address on the nab.com domain rather than to its nab.com.au address.

The bank also blamed human error when it revealed the incident in December last year. At the time, NAB said customers who had their accounts created by the bank’s migrant banking team while they were overseas had their name, address, email address, branch, and account number, as well as an NAB identification number for some customers, emailed incorrectly.

“Although this has been a complex process involving multiple international jurisdictions, all parties — including the email account owner — are taking this extremely seriously and NAB is working hard to resolve this matter for our migrant banking customers as soon as possible,” NAB said in a statement last week.

“From our productive and helpful discussions with the email account owner, we understand that the email address to which the correspondence was incorrectly sent is not actively used and our customers’ emails have not been wrongfully used. We are confident that there has been no unusual activity associated with these migrant banking accounts and we continue to monitor 24/7.”

With AAP