The Department for Registration of Persons (DRP) has warned the public that an external party is impersonating its officials to harvest personal information, while a fresh technical fault forced the department to suspend most National Identity Card services on Wednesday.
The DRP said the fraudsters are using its official hotline number, 0115 22 61 26, and WhatsApp messages to solicit personal details from citizens. In a statement, the department stressed that its officers do not make outgoing calls using that number and urged the public not to share personal information with any caller claiming otherwise.
Separately, operations at the head office and all provincial offices were restricted after the DRP’s computer system broke down for the second time in recent weeks. Only the one-day NIC service was available on Wednesday, with all other standard services temporarily suspended. Technicians were working to restore the system and the department said a further notice would be issued once normal operations resumed.
The twin disruptions land at an awkward moment for the department, which just rolled out the new trilingual “1930” public service hotline under the Registrar General’s office to speed up civil registration services. A repeat system outage and a scam that abuses the department’s own phone number raise fresh questions about data-security controls and operational resilience at the agency responsible for the identity records of more than 21 million citizens.
The DRP did not say how many members of the public may have received the fraudulent calls or whether any personal data had been compromised.
