Get help
Where to get help in Australia with an online game problem
Australia has a good set of services for this, and they are divided by subject rather than by industry. That division is why a complaint sent to the wrong body comes back weeks later with a referral instead of an answer. This page matches the problem to the service, says what each one can actually do, and sets out how to prepare a report that is acted on.
Match the problem to the service
| What happened | Start here | Then, if unresolved |
|---|---|---|
| A purchase was not delivered, or was not as described | The vendor or app store's support channel | Your bank, then state or territory consumer affairs |
| A child made purchases without permission | The store that processed the payment | The bank or card issuer, then consumer affairs |
| Money was lost to a scam | Your bank immediately, then Scamwatch | AFCA if the dispute becomes one with the bank |
| An account was compromised | The vendor's recovery process, then the Australian Cyber Security Centre | IDCARE if identity information was exposed |
| A child is being bullied or harassed in a game | Report inside the game, then the eSafety Commissioner | Police where there is a threat or a criminal offence |
| An organisation mishandled personal information | The organisation itself, in writing | The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner |
| Marketing email that will not stop | The unsubscribe link, then the sender | The Australian Communications and Media Authority |
| Spending has become difficult to control | National Debt Helpline or Gambling Help Online | A financial counsellor through the same service |
What each body does, and what it cannot
- Scamwatch — National Anti-Scam Centre
- Collects scam reports from across Australia, publishes warnings about current scam types, and shares intelligence with other agencies. It does not recover money and does not investigate individual reports for you, which is why contacting your bank first matters when money has moved.
- Australian Cyber Security Centre
- Publishes practical cyber security guidance and operates the Commonwealth's cybercrime reporting route, which refers reports to law enforcement. It is the right destination for account compromise and computer intrusion. It does not restore accounts; the vendor does that.
- eSafety Commissioner
- Australia's online safety regulator. It runs complaints schemes covering cyberbullying of children, adult cyber abuse, image-based abuse and seriously harmful content, and can seek removal of material. It expects the platform's own reporting to have been used first, and it does not handle purchase disputes.
- ACCC and state or territory consumer affairs
- The ACCC explains consumer guarantees and acts on conduct affecting consumers generally; reports build the picture it acts on. Individual disputes are usually handled by the consumer affairs or fair trading agency in your state or territory, which can often approach a trader on your behalf.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
- The federal privacy regulator. It handles privacy complaints under the Privacy Act 1988 and oversees the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. It requires you to have complained to the organisation first and given it a reasonable time to respond, generally 30 days.
- Australian Financial Complaints Authority
- Free external dispute resolution for consumers in disputes with banks, card issuers and other financial firms, once the firm's own complaints process has been used. It is the route when the disagreement has become one about a chargeback decision rather than about the game.
- IDCARE
- A not-for-profit national identity and cyber support service for Australia and New Zealand. It provides free case support for individuals dealing with identity compromise, which is useful when a compromised game account was tied to an address or details used elsewhere.
- Australian Classification Board
- Publishes classification information for titles under the national classification scheme. It is where a classification question is answered; it is not a complaints body for in-game conduct or purchases.
Preparing a report worth reading
Reports are triaged by people with limited time. A short, specific submission with attachments is read; a long narrative without dates is not. Collect the following before you start filling anything in.
- Dates and times of each relevant event, as precisely as you can manage.
- Amounts in AUD, exactly as they appeared on the statement, with transaction identifiers.
- The account identifier or player name, and the vendor's ticket number if one exists.
- Screenshots of the storefront description, the message received or the page in question, captured with the full address bar visible.
- The full text of any email, including the header information if you can export it, rather than a description of it.
- A two-sentence statement of what you want to happen.
Write the sequence of events as a dated list rather than as prose. It takes less time to produce, it is faster to read, and it survives being handed from one officer to another, which most reports are.
What to expect afterwards
Two expectations are worth setting early. First, most reporting bodies do not give a running commentary on what happens next; a report that seems to vanish has usually been recorded and used, not ignored. Second, the body that can compel an outcome is often not the one you report to. Scam reports build the national picture, regulators act on patterns, and the individual remedy usually comes from the vendor, the bank, or a state consumer agency.
That is not a reason to skip reporting. Patterns are made of individual reports, and the warnings published after them are what prevent the next person from losing money to the same approach. It is a reason to pursue the remedy and the report in parallel rather than waiting for one before starting the other.
If the problem is about a person, not a purchase
Some of what goes wrong in online games is social rather than financial: harassment in chat, exclusion, pressure to spend, or contact from an adult that felt wrong. Those are handled differently, and there are free services for them.
Kids Helpline provides free, confidential counselling for young people aged 5 to 25 in Australia, by phone, web chat and email, at any hour. Lifeline provides crisis support for anyone in Australia on 13 11 14. The eSafety Commissioner publishes material written for young people as well as for parents, which is often easier to read together than to relay.
Urgent situations
If a child is in immediate danger, or a threat has been made, the answer is the police on triple zero (000) rather than an online form. If money is moving now — a payment just made to a scammer, or an account being emptied — contact your bank immediately, because the window in which a transfer can sometimes be stopped is measured in hours.
Everything else on this page can wait until the immediate situation is handled. Write down what happened while it is fresh, and make the reports afterwards.
Keeping a record before you need one
The single thing that separates a complaint resolved in a fortnight from one that drags for months is the quality of the record made at the time. Very little of it is technical. A folder on the family computer, or a note on a phone, holding the receipt for every purchase, the ticket number for every support contact and a screenshot of anything that looked wrong, is enough for almost every process described above.
Two details are easy to lose and difficult to reconstruct. The first is the storefront description of what was purchased, which changes when the game updates and cannot be recovered afterwards; a screenshot taken at the moment of purchase preserves it. The second is the email header information from a suspicious message, which is what makes a phishing report useful to the people receiving it, and which is discarded when the message is deleted in frustration.
If the household has more than one player, agree where that record lives. A parent chasing a chargeback three weeks later should not be reconstructing dates from memory and a teenager’s recollection of a Tuesday.