Louise Turner spent several months in contact with Telstra, Tasmania Police and the Telecommunications Ombudsman but none have been able, or willing, to discover what happened with her licence, emails seen by The Examiner show.

Only NSW Police has taken up her cause and is continuing to investigate the allegations.

Ms Turner has held a Tasmanian licence since 2014 and received a renewed copy in January last year, having never lost or scanned it.

In June, she received notification from Telstra that she had opened a phone account at a Sydney store, sending her on a journey that she described as "traumatic" - from Telstra changing its story multiple times, to Tasmania Police refusing to follow up her complaint.

Telstra admitted in an email that footage showed the offender using a licence to open the account under Ms Turner's name, but would not release the footage.

Ms Turner alerted the government's cybercrime reporting network, but received no reply. She said it was just one part of the "nightmare" of dead ends she went down.

"I've still got no answers to what actually happened," she said.

"What is significant about my case is that I have never physically lost or misplaced a driver license.

"My new license had not been stolen or gone missing, was delivered to my house intact and on-time, and I hadn't scanned or copied it. I believe the identity theft occurred at the government level, somewhere between Service Tasmania and the Canberra database.

MORE ON THE FACIAL RECOGNITION ISSUE:

"In light of this database situation, when you start uploading these images, you need to have the police ready to be handling these types of issues."

The Tasmanian Government reportedly sent 410,000 driver licence images to be stored on a Department of Home Affairs facial recognition database, however the Department of State Growth has disputed this.

The licence photos are held on a "segregated" system, but cannot be accessed for face matching services until the federal government approves relevant legislation, which it failed to do last year.

The images remain under the control of Tasmania's Department of State Growth in the meantime.

A spokesperson for the department said the government remained committed to its involvement in the development of the face-matching scheme.

"While the majority of cases involving stolen identity information occur through sources such as general online transactions or mail theft, the new face matching services will actually work to combat identity theft by confirming a person's facial image, preventing this crime from occurring," he said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs said the face verification service has not been hacked.

"The FVS has not been compromised," the spokesperson said.

"It uses encryption and authorisation procedures approved by the Australian Signals Directorate to ensure data protection, security and confidentiality."

A spokesperson for Telstra said the company apologised to Ms Turner and would "continue to look into this issue".