Look out, online bullies, there's a new sheriff in town.

NetSafe has been appointed the approved agency under the Harmful Digital Communications Act - aiming to crack down on online bullying, abuse and harassment.

NetSafe chief executive Martin Cocker said it's up and running with a bigger team to handle complaints - a significant expansion in size and resources overall for the online watchdog.

He said while most people may deal with a serious case of online harassment once or twice in their life, the NetSafe team deal with cases every day and are well-equipped to tackle them.

Cocker said they deal with a myriad of cases every day - dealing with issues on a range of platforms but especially New Zealand's most popular, Facebook.

He said their job is to investigate online bullying complaints brought to NetSafe. If the complaint can't be resolved, NetSafe will advise the person who reported it of the potential outcome if they took the case to the District Court.

"What we do is we take a look at the complaint, we do a quick investigation, and then we work with the parties and various content hosts to try and get a positive outcome by getting it reduced or removed."