In this particular case our friends are elderly from the old school and not what i would call Google or Internet Savvy. In fact, they have had dial-up and barely used the internet apart from email. When they told us of their predicament my wife and i decided to do some investigating for them. As it stands they went to VCAT and won.
Suppose out of all this, its a shame that these two lovely old people who had known their Landlord for years and had never had a problem up until the time they moved out had to go through all this just to recover what was rightfully theirs.