Households should expect scam messages impersonating the Census in the week before the count, with Census night falling on Tuesday 11 August.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics said it is currently unaware of any scams relating to the coming Census. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Scamwatch service has already taken reports of parties impersonating the bureau. A Scamwatch spokesperson said scammers take advantage of major events and trusted government services to make their contact seem legitimate.
The bureau publishes a short list of things it will never do. It does not ask for bank details, credit card information, money, passwords, identity documents or tax file numbers. It does not offer prizes or incentives for completing the form. It does not make contact through social media.
Genuine ABS email comes from an address ending in @abs.gov.au and contains no hyperlinks. Text messages show a sender ID of ABSGov or CENSUS rather than a phone number. Letters carry the ABS logo, and field officers carry identification cards and wear bright yellow satchels. The Census support line is 1300 100 557.
Completing the form is compulsory under the Census and Statistics Act 1905. A household that does not respond is issued a formal written direction first. Refusing after that direction can be prosecuted, with fines of up to $364 a day. Knowingly giving false or misleading information carries a fine of up to $3,640. The form runs to as many as 66 questions.
That combination is what makes the scam window wide. Every household in the country is expecting official contact about a legally compelled form in the same fortnight, which is precisely the cover a fraudulent letter or text needs.
The bureau's own record is part of the reason the advice matters. On the first day of the 2016 Census the ABS website was hit by four distributed denial of service attacks and taken offline for about 36 hours. The bureau's annual report put the additional cost of that outage at $24 million. The 2021 count ran without the same failure.
Liz Allen, a demographer at the Australian National University, said the count gives an important reference point of who is in the country at a particular time. Census figures feed the distribution of public funding and the calculation of how many federal seats each state and territory is entitled to, which is why response rates carry weight beyond the statistics themselves.
Census night is Tuesday 11 August. Anything arriving in the bureau's name before then that asks for a password, a payment or a bank detail is not from the bureau.
