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Now, if you've ever been scammed, or you've ever worried about being scammed, and who doesn't you need this now to speak to a man whose life's work is really tracking down and recovering money from scammers, recovering money. Most times it's gone, but he has a record of finding it. His name is Ken Gamble. He's chair of a company
called IFW Global. He's a private detective. Now, when you think about a private detective, you probably think about somebody in an overcoat with a camera peering through a motel window to catch somebody in the act of adultering. Fortunately, the divorce laws have changed, that doesn't happen anymore, but the private investigators still exist and do a lot of work. Ken Gamble is a man. He's arguably becoming one of the best known private detectives in Australia. Unlike most, he
does not have a background in the police force. He's been various things, including an auxiliary firefighter or a reservist in the army, a boxer. He's been involved in many high profile cases. He's been on TV often. His work on scammers has been successful and it's clear from evidence he gave to various parliamentary committees. He doesn't think enough is being done for average Australians to protect them first and to get their money back second, and to catch
the crooks third. He's been shouting about this for many years and well, if people had perhaps listened earlier, there would have been fewer victims. The first four months of this year, scams took nearly one hundred and twenty million dollars out of pockets in this country. There has been a twenty eight percent increase on the previous year. Now as fewer scams, there's more money going out. Social media scams specifically doubled in the first half of this year.
Ken Gamble has been warning this would happen, and it is. Ken Gamble, thanks very much for speaking.
With us, my pleasure.
I'd love to get straight to it. We'll get more on your background later. Peering through windows or whatever your Tit is a private investigator. Scams growing changing. But you've been warning about this for years, haven't you.
I have, Neil, I have, and it started a long time ago, actually, back in two thousand and seven when I started getting involved in investigating scams. It was the Rugby World Cup ticket scam. In France and then the world ticket scam of the Beijing Olympics in two thousand
and eight. So I went public back then, initially started to go public repeatedly after that time, warning the police and the government that online scam and internet related crime is going to become one of the greatest threats to national security all over the world. And but thirteen years ago I made a public appearance at a Western Union conference and I made a comment to a journalist that police had lost the battle with scams at that point. That was twenty twelve, and within a few hours it
was headlines in the Daily Telegraph. Internet fraud watchdog says that police have lost the battle of scams, and I was heavily criticized by police. I even received a phone call from Cold Ice and the head of the fraud squad criticizing me for making that comment, saying that we've got no problem with scams. We're well and truly on top of it. But of course that was far from the truth.
But have they listened to you yet as any You've appeared before these parliamentary committees and the rest, and pretty much I think the most recent one was last year. The message is still the same. They're not on top of it.
No. And the problem with law enforcement of the way in which it functions is it's very reactive. You know, they react to crimes after they're committed. Police don't do a lot of proactive enforcement. They do in the world of drugs and terrorism. They do a lot of proactive work in relation to even child exploitation, you know, those types of crimes that are regarded to be crimes against children or vulnerable people, or even national security concerns. They
do proactive work in relation to those crimes. But never fraud. And what nobody ever saw coming was that fraud was going to become the number one income earner for organized crime, for terrorists, for all of the biggest criminal enterprises on the planet. And that's what That's exactly what's happened.
Now, Well, are they doing enough now? Is enough of it?
Nowhere near? Nowhere near it? Nowhere near it? They have launched Operation Firestorm at the AFP, They've launched at the
JPC three several months after I testified. I testified in May last year at a Senate inquiry as to the catastrophic failure of our government to protect Australians and within a few months they had launched an anti scam task force at the JPC three and they are very busy and they are tackling scams, but they can only really look at a small portion of the amount of scams that have come in and plus a lot of the
damage has done over the past decade. Just about every vulnerable Australian in this country has been targeted by a scam, so they've cleaned them out. Billions and billions of dollars has been cleaned out of vulnerable Australian So it's too late that the ship is sunk.
Well, that means millions of people apart, what about from the money you've been victims, because it can be devastating stuff, and perhaps some of that could have been avoided.
All of it could have been avoided. There's only a handful of syndicates that have been causing this destruction and damage to Australia. You know, the Israelis, the Israeli crime groups are putting up all the ads on Facebook. The Chinese are doing the pig butchering love scams.
On what So what's pig butchering?
So pig butchering is what law enforcement describes a specific type of scam orchestrated by Chinese organized crime groups out of compounds in Southeast Asia. It places like Me and mar Lao, Thailand, Cambodi, Philippines, and more recently in Dubai.
And these are compounds of probably a thousand plus workers sitting in offices all day, every day on their iPhones, making connections with Australians, building relationships, sometimes romantic, sometimes business relationships, but building a relationship with a victim and then luring them into investing into cryptocurrency.
Okay, that's a bit like a call a crooks call center.
Yes, yes, it is a call center. It's a big call center. The reason they call it pig butchering it comes from China. This particular scam started in China, and there's three stages to butchering a pig. There's finding the pig, there's grooming the pig, and then butchering the pig. So that's the three stages of pig butchering. And they've coined that phrase because of the callous act in which they find the victims. They then groom the victim, and then
they financially butcher the victim. So pig butchering has become a global phenomenon.
And is this are you talking more about investment scams or are they doing the lot through the system.
All investment scams. It's luring people into making an investment
into a cryptocurrency platform. And what they're very sophisticated and they make the people the victim, believe that they're making a lot of money, and so they kind of target vulnerable every day mums and dads who give it a go, and then all of a sudden, the thousand dollars they put in is ten thousand dollars and then it's one hundred thousand dollars and they get all excited and start throwing all this money in, but the profits are actually
not real. The profits are fake. So at the end of the day they end up putting all their money in and then and then losing everything. And that's become a huge, huge scam.
Well that's the Chinese. What are the Israelis doing? The Israeli organized crime?
So the Israelis dominate the four X and cryptocurrency trading industry globally. They run massive syndicates all over Eastern Europe countries like Bulgaria, Cyprus, in Ukraine, Serbia, they have call centers set up again targeting Australians, putting ads up on Facebook. These are all the celebrity adverts that you see on Facebook. You've heard about the celebrity endorsement adverts that pop up
all over Facebook. Well, the Israelis are behind those. This is an Israeli born sort of very unique and very sophisticated scam. So they promote it on Facebook and Instagram, and then when someone joins, they immediately get a call from a call center in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe from a customer service helping you to start trading. And again they make it look like you're making a fortune.
You said targeting Australians. They're targeting people around the world, I suppose. But is Australia a particular.
Time, Yes, number one target in the world that we have been for a number of years. And I've interviewed various criminals from different countries that we've arrested during operations, and I've asked them straight, why do you target Australia And their answer is always the same. We have the most luck in Australia because Australians are the easiest to trick. They're the easiest.
What's wrong with us?
Well, because it's not. Well, it's bad that all these people are getting defrauded, but it's a sign of what sort of country we are. There's a lot of honest, hardworking, trustworthy people in this country and that's the reality is that a majority of this country is honest, hardworking, trustworthy type of people that could never imagine that someone could get on the phone and tell you this incredible story.
And the level of deception that has been per portrayed by these gangs has never seen, never been seen before in Australia. So these vulnerable people don't they don't understand that this actually could exist.
Well, is the police and government in action or slowness to act? Is that part of the reason Australia as a target as.
Well, that's the core reason why Australia target.
That we're gullible and honest, decent people and we're not being protected by the system.
No, because the system was never set up to investigate these type of crimes coming from a foreign based, international, cross border syndicate. Because when someone gets to fraud and loses their life savings, they go down the local police station, whether it's Melbourne, whether it's Country Victoria, whether it's Perth, anywhere in the country. They go down the local police station and make a complaint. As soon as the police look at the case and they say, well, you've dealt
with someone overseas. There's nothing much we can do. It's out of our jurisdiction, so they won't investigate it, and if they do escalate it up up to the AFP. AFP up until very recently, didn't have the ability to investigate it either. They had no mandate to investigate fraud against individuals in Australia. That's just the way the rules were. But if you defrauded a comwealth government agency then of
course you'd have the AFP all over you. They but that's all changed since last year since they launched the Operation Firestorm at the JPC three.
You mentioned Chinese, Israelis, Nigerians are still in it. These are the people who used to send me facts as fifteen years ago saying they had twenty million dollars for me.
That's right. The Nigerians still play a part, but they're
not in the top three. They'd be probably number four, so that the third biggest group that's targeting Australians is the British so the British classic boiler room fraudsters, the Wolf of Wall Street, the sleck talking posh British accent, selling stocks and shares and promoting an IPO with American corporation so that they are still getting the most amount of money out of investors because they're targeting high net worth people that would never normally invest or take a
risk with their money. But someone may have just got their superannuation cashed in they want to put it into a safe term deposit. For example, they might want to buy a bank bond. They don't want to send their money overseas. They just want to put their money into a bond. So they go online, they start looking for comparisons, percentage rates, and all of a sudden they get a call from a posh British accent from a financial advisory firm in downtown Sydney. Will help you to set up
your to set up the term deposit. We'll do everything for you. We have relationships with the banks. We have an AFSL. You can check the AFSL. It's a real one. And all of a sudden, the Australian Financial Securities in financial services license, so as regulates anyone that offers investments.
So they have a real one. They have one.
They have a real one. These days are setting up companies, putting directors into the companies, obtaining an AFS license and using it. We've just investigating a twenty five million dollar fraud right now, of which they used a real financial services license and the director of the company is a criminal.
Well how do they get the license?
Great question, something that we'll be asking ask very soon. They actually rent the license from another license holder, and they pay several thousand dollars a month to rent it under what's called a corporate authorized representative.
So it's a legal license and a proper license which they've borrowed and people, of course you check it out. So legitimate, correct, license.
Correct, And that's what's been happening. So the sophisticated investor who doesn't want to take a risk with his money, does his due diligence, finds out that the company has got an AFS sell and all of a sudden he's sending millions of dollars into the bank account, which is also an Australian bank account under the company name, and within twenty four hours that money has gone off to
a crime syndicate in Hong Kong. It's gone to an account in Hong Kong and then distributed through crypual currency to crime bosses around the world.
Interesting you mentioned the British link. It can be difficult and we're not going to get much luck. We're dealing with the Chinese police in terms of tracking something down, but surely the British is a lot of cooperation between Australian and British police. Can't they get on to it together?
And that's the big problem, Neil. That's the problem that the British police. It's outside of their jurisdiction because all of these British gangsters are not in England. None of them are in England. They're in Southeast Asia. They're in the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, they're all over Southeast Asia. They would never base themselves in the England because they'd be vulnerable to British law enforcements. So they're very clever.
They set themselves up in places third world countries where they can live the life, and they target Austrains from those countries where the laws are weak.
Is greed behind this? I mean, is there an element of I was always taught and I'm financially literate and financially very careful person. I reckon I work hard for the money. I'm not going to give it to anybody else easily. Perhaps too much so, but I was always told if it looks too good to be true, if the interest rate's too good and they're telling you it's no risk and it's double the interest rates, then you can get in a legitimate place like the local bank.
Be suspicious. But is greed underlying this? Do you think other people being con.
It's definitely part of it. There are certain individuals that get scammed that are just doing it purely by greed. You know, they're just trying to trying to get as much money as they can. And certainly there is a part of it, But what we see in a majority of cases, it's not greed at all. These are people that went out. These are hardworking mums and dads of Australia who are honest and trustworthy people who have gone out to put a secure investment into a bank, bond
or something of that effect, buy some shares. This is a very conservative investment that they've sought to invest in and then been scammed. So these are not people even these are risk adverse people. These are people that would not normally take a risk. And the only reason they put it into this particular bond was because it was only two percent higher than the standard bank. So that's clever.
So the criminals are very clever. They just make it a couple of percent more, not something ridiculous that they'll offer these investments where they're just getting that little bit better deal. And so you've got investors coming along that are doing their utility, they're doing everything right and they're not greedy people at all, but they still fall victim to a scam.
I was reading that so far this year scams investment scams on social media of doubled in Australia and up to about twenty three and a half million dollars already social media alone, investment scams of doubled. The same groups doing.
That a majority of investment related scams. So on social media you've got every type of scam. You've got so many different types. But when you look at the majority of where the money goes, it's in investment scam. So if you look at the three groups, and I'll include Nigerians in there, because the Nigerians have resurfaced recently very heavily doing cryptocurrency scams. But they're not as sophisticated as
the Israelis or the British. Probably a little bit better than the Chinese, because the Chinese have to employ English speaking people, so they can't do the scams themselves. They have to rely upon others who can speak English because
they're targeting Australians. So those scams that you see on Facebook and all these online social media scams, you've got a majority of those scams coming from those four crime groups, the Nigerians, the Chinese, the British and the Israelis majority and we know that because we've traced We've tracked hundreds of them and a majority of them come back to a syndicate that is run by one of those four crime groups. And then you've got some other groups like
Eastern Europeans, Russians, Ukrainians. You know, you've got a smaller minority of criminals that also do those scams. And increasingly we're seeing scams perpetrated from Australia on other Australians. So we're seeing a lot of scams come out of the Gold Coast, for.
Example, Australian crooks.
Australian crooks doing the same sort of scams, but now doing them on shore because of the difficulty in you know, the police response is so slow that they can run their scam for three months, shut it all down, pocket you know, a million dollars or more, and then get on with the next one and by the time law enforcement come along, they're gone. They're long gone.
We must be talking about in a year internationally, billions and billions of dollars.
Yeah, about five billion in the last few years. That's gone out of Australia into the hands of criminals and terrorists.
But what about Heaven knows what. Well we guess what the terrorists are using it for. And if you expand that to the rest of the world. I see Australia as a world leader, but we're in the binions each year.
One of the highest per capita, one of the highest lost countries in the world. The United States has been hit with these pig butchering scams during COVID. They've lost a record number a record amount of money. It's up in the many many billions of US dollars in losses.
So Western countries themselves are being very heavily targeted by these types of scams, but Australia is still up there, and I'd say we have to be up there in the top five countries in the world that are targeted by these criminal groups.
So I was going to say, so this this is the crime scenario for the future, but it's actually now, this is the crime issue in the world.
Yes, absolutely. You see what's happened is billions of dollars of money has gone into the hands of organized crime groups. And I mentioned terrorism because we've traced some of these scams to members of terrorist organizations. We've traced it to people in Israel, in Egypt, in Lebanon. We've got a number of cases where we've got hard evidence and proof that these have gone into the hands of has Bowler sympathizers for example. You know, everyone is getting in on
the act now. Outlaw motorcycle gangs are doing scams. Organized crime groups, traditional mafia that used to do a lot of other serious crimes have all turned now to financial crime because it's very high profit and very low risk.
So okay, what do you do with that information? And what he's done with it. You obviously pass it on to the authorities or the law and law enforcements.
What happens, we pass it all on. We just pass it on. We leave it to the hands of authorities. You know, it's not our job to track down terrorists, although we track down the people that are responsible for our clients frauds. So if someone hires us and loses a million dollars and they want to know who who got the money, will we'll find them and we will track them down and will arrest them.
Well, is anything being done with the information you're providing our terrorists who are making this money being arrested anywhay?
I'm sure the information has passed through the relevant channels, but it's never shared back with us because you know, there's long been no sharing between private investigators and police. That's been historical for decades. So the same with banks. They won't share information with us. When our client loses millions of dollars the money goes into an Australian bank, we can't get informed from the banks. They suppress our ability to get information to chase down the criminals.
But you're a fully licensed operator yourself and the organization. I mean, there's no questioning your credentials.
Correct, that's right, But every bank in Australia will tell you we're not allowed to do that because of banking secrecy. We can only do it through a subpoena. So they send the victim to court who's just lost their life savings and has no money left to spend another twenty thousand dollars on lawyers to get the information which could just easily be handed over a couple.
Of specific scams. As mentioned in the past day or so about concerns about crypto ATMs and the amount of money being scammed through. Now, I didn't even know crypto ATMs exist, but apparently there's more crypto ATMs in Australia and they're not all crooked, but more crypto ATMs than there are some banking ATMs. What happens there? What is a crypto atm?
Well, it's where you can go and you can exchange your money for cryptocurrency and then you can use that cryptocurrency for goods and services because a lot of people now are choosing to use cryptocurrency to pay for goods and services online. It's also used for legal purposes. I mean, they can't control what happens to the ATM. But the crypto ATMs are just really like a giant iPad. I mean they're just connected. They have a back end connection
with exchanges, but it's just really a computer. It doesn't spit out money, but it's connected to an exchange and you can purchase money from those exchanges. Now, just recently I heard that some of these cryptocurrency ATMs have popped up in all sorts of places, including a hydroponics store.
So they're appearing everywhere, and of course, you know, the government can't really do much to stop it because of the way that cryptocurrency is proliferated in Australia and will continue to do so in the future.
Well what's the scam here though? Do you actually get the cryptocurrency or are you be losing your money?
Oh yeah, no, no, there's no scam with the crypto ATM is just a facility to be able to exchange your real fit money into cryptocurrency. So if you want to take money out of your own exchange, you want to cash it in. Say you've got an account with a crypto exchange that has a relationship with an Australian bank. Then you can go and take money out of that ATM the same as what you can do with the bank.
It So instead of taking money out of NAB or Westpac out of an ATM on the wall, taking your cash out of your bank, the ATM, crypto ATM are usually taking it out of your cryptocurrency exchange, the same philosophy.
I was reading another report today and this is a whole different area talking about cruel the romance scams. A gentleman though I think he's in his sixtiesmmed out of one point four million dollars. How do they work and how common are they?
The romance scams, these are also very common. The Nigerians definitely take the number one spot for those. The relationship building over a long period of time. They're very cunning, they're very well trained. These types of building relationships and relationship scams and romance scams are long term, you know. They sometimes we've seen these go for two or three years the relationship and the victim thinks that they're going to marry the other person and they're even making wedding plans,
but of course it never eventuates. But what happens again, it's vulnerable Australians who are not aware that they may become separated or divorced, or they may, you know, in their older years, they may get lonely and they may go on a dating site and meet someone who they believe is the person of their dreams, and that person's
actually a scammer, putting up a fake profile. And then they develop a relationship and the person starts to groom the victim by giving them compliments and telling them how beautiful they are, and then the perpetrator will come up start coming up with all sorts of reasons why they're
in financial trouble they need some help. A common one is that they're in the US Army and they're based over in an area of conflict and they're not allowed to make phone calls or do video calls because of security reasons, so they tell the victim that they can only communicate via email. That's a classic scam. So these romance scams probably not as big as they used to be, but they're still going.
The AI terrifies, well, that's not right, but it concerns me in a lot of ways. Outside the scamming area, we've seen specific AI folkes on the Prime ministrants in Albanisi. One talking about investment opportunity, which was a scam. Another one was talking about gambling legislation, which was totally fake. Is this the future? These sort of and how on earth do you tell that's not elbow? How do you know?
Well, again, it's awareness. These deep folks are just starting. We are going to see futuristic scams. They're already coming out now. I've got people doing deep fakes for me. My company has been the subject of hundreds of imposter websites, even people purporting to be me using my photo and using one recently I saw with me talking with an American accent, and that was used in a fraud in
Denmark to take twenty thousand euros off somebody. So the deep fakes are a real concern, and again it's got to be addressed from a legislative angle, from a law perspective, because it is identity fraud, taking someone's identity and using that identity. So it's a time.
Is it not illegal at the moment to do that.
Well, it's I don't think it's. There's specific laws for AI yet, they still need to be drafted, but there's laws on using someone's identity. So if someone uses my face to commit a crime, then it's identity fraud. They're using my identity even though it's in an AI sense. So there are laws that can be used, but there's still you know, there's still needs to be new legislation in relation to these types of scams because AI and cryptocurrency, those two combined have created a whole new crime set
for these organized gangs. So all of these criminal groups that I've just mentioned earlier are now getting heavily into AI and cryptocurrencies to conduct all their operations, which gives them another unique cutting edge advantage over other criminals.
So these celebrity scams, it's the same thing. Is that also? And I've seen a few of them on Twitter myself, people I know, David Kosh, Eddie Maguire people, and I just no weigh that stem and I know that I know that they wouldn't be doing that, but people have been sucked in. Is that an AI trick as well?
Yeah, Well what happened They started off just using their images, just putting their image up and creating fake media stories, and then when the deep fakes came in and these AI apps like Parrot, for example, one called Parrot that's an AI app you can download on your phone and you can get Arnold Swartzen and get to give you a testimonial or Sylvester stallone. You can just do anything.
You can create anyone in the world. You can put You only need a few seconds of somebody's voice to create a voice print, that is, to create their voice and then superimpose it onto a face, and the AI program will make the lips move in coordination with what you're saying. So it's very, very realistic. So what we've seen now is we've seen a diversion of those original scams, the ones using just the photographs of Koshi and Eddie McGuire and all those. Now it's progressed to deep fakes
where they're actually talking. I've got one just a few days ago with our Foreign Minister making a public statement and Donald Trump criticizing the austrane government for covering up this ability for all these people to make all this money, suppressing it. So you know, that's the sort of thing that we're facing at the moment.
Tell me what the process is to go through it. If I'm fall into something and I'm scammed, for five or ten thousand dollars. Where do I go?
Well, if you've scammed for five or ten thousand dollars, you're probably never going to see that money again because it wouldn't be worth while trying to pursue it. But the first step is cyber dot gov dot au. That's the national cybercrime reporting portal for any cybercrime complaint in Australia. A lot of people don't realize that that's the place to go. It's the only place to go. You can't
go down the police station anymore. You can't. There's no point contacting scam Watch or ASSEK or any of these other agencies because they simply don't investigate. They will refer it to the proper agency, and that's the Australian Cyber Security Center, which run cyber dot gov dot au, and they treas the case and they will immediately escalate that complaint directly to your local police station in the area
of where you live. And then that could be Broken Hill, so you will get Broken Hill detectives all of a sudden they have got a fraud which has happened online, and what they generally do is they assess it and then they say, look, you know, this is out of our jurisdiction. There's no chance of finding out who these
people are. The money's gone overseas. They may do an initial investigation and find out that the money was transferred overseas, and that's about as far as it goes, because you know, state police and even federal police can't work on They can't go into foreign countries investigating without the permission and authority and cooperation of foreign law enforcement.
Well is it make any difference for instead of ten grand I've been scammed of dominion or five hundred thousand, Does that make a difference.
Well, it doesn't make a difference to the level of effort put in by law enforcement, because even if it's a lot of money, they still have the same problem. They've got the jurisdictional problems. But if you lost a million dollars, then you'll go start starting finding people that can actually go after the money, like my firm, IFW Global, and there's others as well that go after the money, that actually track down where the money's gone. We can
trace the cryptocurrency. We have certified traces in house. We can trace where it's gone, where it was cashed, out, who cashed it out, get the records of the wallet holder, and then we can file a criminal case, prepare a case against that person in the Philippines, or in Bulgaria or in South Africa, can file a case against it. And we do that all the time. That's our business model.
You've said to one of the inquiries I was looking at it was time for the authorities to put Australians first, to put Australians first. Have they done that yet?
I don't think so. No, I don't think we're anywhere near it. You know. This is what amazes me is that the banks and the banks and the government has spent billions of dollars on cybersecurity related issues, but very little money on doing proactive enforcement. And what I mean by proactive enforcement is actually stopping the scams. I know, the National Anti Scam Center doing a lot, and we can't deny that they're doing a lot, but I can get on lot that.
Eighty six million dollars in itself the Anti Scam Center.
Yeah, that's right, that's what it costs. Yeah, that's right. So there's a lot of money gone into blocking phones, calls and websites and all the rest of it. But I can can jump online right now today and I can find a half a dozen scam site within a matter of seconds that are targeting Australians as we speak, and that people are sending money today to those scam companies.
But it sounds like, why are you described as a very peacemeal effort. I mean, we've got bits and pieces here. We've got some poor young detective in Broken Hill trying to investigate something which is right out of his league. We've got a bad reporting system, we've got bad warning systems, We're not alert to it. If it's that piecemeal, how do we bring it all together? What's the answer.
The answer is a national task force that deals with fraud. Federal police, federal police, state police, every type of every type of individual that has the skill set to go after these criminals. And that includes cybersecurity professionals, forensic workers, crypto tracing, you know, not just law enforcement. Law enforcement can't do this on their own, and they're the first to admit it. So there needs to be a national effort.
That is a task force built up a private and public sector professionals that can actually attack this at its core and also attack the financial trail, the financial trail, go after the money and attack the assets, because what is not being done is nobody is going after all the assets that all these billions of dollars that have gone into the hands of organized crime. Nobody really is
looking into that. So a National cyber Fraud Task Force, for example, their sole responsibility would be to attack and to block all of these frauds that are coming into Australia on a daily basis, and that's not being done.
I can't quite work out the lack of will here. I mean, is it that they're inner sense soft? Victims have just lost money, but it's the same as having a gunpointed at you though I could ruin lives. Is there not enough sympathy for the victims because they've sort of got themselves into it. Is that part of the problem.
Yes, that's another huge part of the problem. For many, many years, there's been a lot of victim blaming. You know, I've even had police office tell me, you know, on the quiet, just how can this victim be so stupid? How can they be so stupid? So there's this victim blaming when it comes to and of course greed may play a part in that someone invests money and then they lose it all and they get themselves into a big mess and then want the police to clean it up.
And so some of the police, you know, their view is, look, we're so busy fighting violent crime and other types of crime. We don't have the resources to chase someone online because you've been you know, you've been a victim of a fraud. So for a long long time there was victim blaming. But I think in recent years, with the emergence of organized crime groups behind these scams and the sophistication of them,
there's been a change of perception within our government. And of course the Senate inquiry last year helped a lot, when I was able to sit face to face with the state senators and explain into them the actual damage that this was doing to the community, every community all over the country, and the amount of casualties that have been left behind and the lives that have been destroyed. I mean, I deal with these victims on a daily basis and have done for years.
Yeah, I'm going to ask you some of the war stories, if you like, some of what you've been involved in. On your website, there's a story of an architect called Tony Camalieri, which involved a lot of money and a lot of effort. Tell me that story.
What happened, Well, Tony got juoped into investing money into a company called Smith and Olsen, which was an American company based in Chicago. Looked very slick, posh British accents on the other end of the phone. He ended up investing into stocks and shares and his portfolio was growing quite well. He was very happy with it. They weren't
putting pressure on him. All of a sudden, He's done his one point eight million dollars superannuation, all of his money was in the shares, only to discover that it was a scam. So he woke up one day realizing that he'd been a victim of a scam, and they cut contact with him, and he actually asked them he actually wanted to go to Chicago and meet them in person. They said, yep, come over and meet us. We'll be there. We'll send a limo to the airport and pick you up.
And he went to Chicago. He got on a plane and went there and there was no limo. He went to the offices of Smith and Olsen downtown Chicago, and went to the security guard, and the security guard just shook his head and said that they're not here, and you better talk to the FBI because they were here last week looking for the same company. And anyway, that luckily for Tarney, he went to North Sydney Detectives. He
spoke to police. He ended up finding out that there was an agency at that time, which was my firm, that did recoveries, and he subsequently contacted me. I had a meeting with him in Sydney. He told me the whole story. And I already knew a lot about these syndicates because I'd already been over in the Philippines busting them years before. So I had a lot of intelligence about this type of scam and the type of people behind it. So I said, well, let's track him down.
And he engaged my services, and against the advice of his family and friends, all of them said, don't do it, don't spend any more money, just leave it behind. Don't waste more money chasing good money after bad. You know, he went against their will. His marriage broke up, his family were against him. Everyone was against him except me. I said, if you invest in my time and effort, I will give it. I will relentlessly pursue these people.
Fast forward a couple of years, we arrested the mastermind and we froze two point two million US dollars in his bank account in Hong Kong, and within three months, I had that money transferred back into the one point eight million dollars, the money that Tony had lost. I had that money transferred back into his bank account.
How did you do it? How did you track them? How did you do it well? Which said a professional secret.
No, no, we follow the money trail. So the boiler room fraud industry used money mules. They outsourced all the banking to third party contractors, third party criminal contractors who who launded the money. So what they had done is they'd hired an Israeli group from Tel Aviv and they launded this money through Belgium, UK, other countries, and we just chased the money. We followed the money. We started following the money trail, doing discovery applications on banks, and
we followed the money trail. We found out they're all Israeli nationals that were on all the banks. So we decided to do a confrontation operation where we go to every single address in Belgium, London, and Israel. Three addresses. We confronted these three bank account holders all at once on one evening, all simultaneously. Now that shook them up a bit, because they all contacted the Israeli guy and said, we're in trouble here. We've got all these investigators coming
after us. And so the Israeli money launder he decided to come clean with me. He contacted me and said, I can help you, but you've got to leave my people alone. So I'll make a deal with you. I'll tell you who we launded the money for, I'll tell you exactly who's behind your client's fraud, but you have to leave us out of it and don't go after my people.
So it's cost a victim one point eight million. What did costume to get it back?
He spent about one hundred thousand dollars getting it back. Yeah, about one hundred thousand with legal fees and our fees. Probably around maybe a bit more, but certainly a minimum one hundred thousand dollars he had to spend to get to get the money back, and to get to that point, of course, there's no guarantee that you're going to get it back. But that's an example of when you do invest into going after the perpetrators, there is a chance of recovering money.
Is there something that stands out to you as perhaps the saddest job you've had in front of you?
I think a lot of them are sad, Neil, There's so many sad cases of people who have just given everything. They have given away the money that were supposed to go to their children, They're given away, the money that was supposed to go to their husband for treatment because he's got a terminal illness. I mean, there are so many sad stories from people who are vulnerable. I don't know if there's any particular ones that stand out more
than others. I have dealt with a lot of very sad cases, but I don't I try not to get emotionally attached to these cases because there's a lot of time and effort goes into our investigations, and a lot of time and effort goes into counseling those victims as well, And you know, we try to keep them positive and keep them motivated, and you know, we're almost doing counseling for a lot of these victims as to how they can recover and what are going to do in their
life if they don't recover the money, how are they going to move forward?
You're talking about a hell of a lot of money. You're talking about well organized, sophisticated, dangerous criminals. Has your own life been on the line.
A number of times? Yes, There's been a number of threats made to me by syndicates overseas in the Philippines and Thailand, criminal syndicates, criminal groups that have tried to tried to get me to stop coming into the Philippines, for example, particularly Philippines. There's been a number of very credible threats made against me in the Philippines by local enforcers whose job it is to protect the criminal groups.
And these are pretty heavy people. Some of them are gangsters, some of them are very dangerous criminals who are connected to organized crime groups. And so I have to use my discretion, but to be honest that when I hear that, and I hear that people are trying to do, that makes me more relentless to go after them. And I have gone in and arrested some of these people that
have made threats against me. One particular group in the Philippines threatened me back in two thousand and eighteen, and they sent me a text message saying I was on a death wish and if I don't leave the Philippines within twenty four hours, that I'm on a death wish, meaning that there's a hit man coming after me. About three months later, I flew back in in an evening to conduct a seven am raid on the syndicate and arrested the whole lot of them, including.
You can't arrest them though you're working with local police.
The correct correct you know. So I was present during the arrest When I say I'm present with the police. When we kicked the doors in with a swat.
Team, everyone shot at.
No, I haven't been shot at, but I've had firearms produced twice. In my younger days. I used to be an insurance investigator working for Goo and Nrama and all these insurance companies, and a couple of incidents has happened in my younger days. One was out at Menindi near
Broken Hill. I was chased by kangaroo shooters who were firing shots in the air, I would assume, but they caught me on a property and chased me through the bushes and they about five or six of them with guns, came roaring through the bushes trying to chase me off a property because I used to do a lot of bush surveillance in those days. The other one was in Gilgandra where I stumbled across a marijuana plantation trying to film someone for insurance fraud for having a fake compensation claim.
And that person again found footprints around the marijuana plantation, come out and started searching the property and saw me approach my position and I had to get up and run, and he went and grabbed a shot gun and came after me and again fired shots in the air. I don't know where the shots were being fired, but there were shots fired.
Obviously, spent a lot of time following people surreptitiously, but your face is very well known. Now how do you do it? I can't wander down the street behind them.
Can you. Well, I don't follow people anymore. I've got a team that does that. I've got operations running right now in multiple countries, and we just did a raid last week in the Philippines and I'm not there. We've got other raids coming up in different countries. So I don't show my face until I walk in the door with the police.
Ken Gamble from my FW Global is really running one of the biggest anti scam operations, certainly in Australia and perhaps in the world. But he started life as your average private detective. What is your average private protective? More of that in the moment. Now, how did you become a private detective? You sort of went to almost went to a course or a school. How do you become a private We're pretty young too, how do you become a private detective?
Very young? Back in nine eighty eight, I was twenty two years of age. I just come out of the Army Reserve and I was looking for an opportunity. And I had a great uncle, Uncle Ray Stubbs. He was a private investigator in the nineteen sixties and seventies for about twenty years, and he used to mainly do matrimonial work in the old days, because that was a big part of it, busting husbands and wives playing up. You know. I think in those days it was illegal to have
an affair, you know. So he actually said to me, why don't you think about becoming a private investigator. That was in nineteen eighty seven before I left Queensland to go to Sydney. And I got down to Sydney at the beginning of eighty eight and he got me an interview with a company called Webster's Investigations, and I went in there. I spoke to a guy called Kevin Lehman,
who was the manager. I put out my portfolio of my achievements and I'd been a boxer, I'd been in the Fire Service, I've been a soldier, and he said, yep, sounds like you might be a good fit. We're looking for people to sit in the back of vans and go out in the country and spy on people who are ripping off the Goio are doing insurance sheets, insurance, fake insurance claims, people claiming to have a million dollar back injury, but in fact they're doing hard labor every
day on the farm. So I become part of this surveillance team and over the next three years ran operations all over the state of New South Wales, particularly down in Griffith and the River Arena area, on all the Italian families, because there was over fifty million dollars worth of claims came out of Griffith alone. Back in nineteen between nineteen eighty nine and ninety two, and we knocked those claims down by fifty percent by investigating and getting
evidence to prove that these people were not disabled. So that's how I started my career.
And actually, do you go you study anything, do you'll do to a private tech class or something?
No?
Not on the job.
No. On the job. Back in those days, it was purely surveillance work. So I did surveillance work for the first fifteen years of my career. Back in the nineties, I had a surveillance company that specialized in surveillance. In fact, ninety nine, I was poached by the Commonwealth Government and I won a tender to provide covert surveillance services to the Comonwealth government. And that was the first time in history that the Commonwealth Government had ever ever outsourced work
to private investigators. And I was one of the companies that won that tender.
In ninety nine, What were you surveilling for the government?
Central Link cheats ah, people that were rauting the centillink system. But this was more than just people cheating the doll This is someone who had twelve identities and was getting paid twelve times their normal payment. Because they had twelve different identities, you know, or people in the Centerlink office that was working with crime groups outside to cheat the system. So we were doing sort of organized criminal stuff but
with sindling, and that was a very interesting job. We had to go through a protective clearance and working for the government so as a contractor. So that lasted several years. In two thousand and two, I gave it away because it was not financially viable anymore, and I made a commercial decision to get out of all that type of work, insurance work, and I went overseas and started doing it in national work.
And that's how you got into cybercrime.
Yes, that's how I got into cybercrime. I went and lived in America. I worked two years with a company over in the States that had former CIA guys working for them. So I made a lot of intelligence contacts around the world. Started to get to know a lot of people that worked in intelligence services in various different countries, and they were a different breed than law enforcement because
intelligence people are very very different different skill sets. So I started learning the art of gathering intelligence, particularly in foreign countries. So over the next few years, I started doing all these different operations, kidnapping investigations, child abduction cases, fugitive tracking, you all sorts of different types of work.
And then it wasn't until two thousand and seven, when I was asked to investigate a big scam syndicate at the Rugby World Cup, when I started getting involved in Internet related crime, and then I saw the opportunity to. In fact, when I started, I wanted to. I wanted I believed back in two thousand and seven that Internet editet law enforcement should be privatized, and that was what started me off on this mission. You know, I said, one day the internet will be the crime on the
Internet will be uncontrollable. And IPOLD just made an announcement recently saying that law enforcement cannot cope future in the future of crime on the Internet. They're not geared up for it. So there's going to have to be a lot of public private partnerships going on. So that's basically how I got into it, and from there, you know, the rest is kind of history. I've never stopped lessly pursued it.
Your personal background grew up for some years in a pub, You learned to fight, you were a boxer. But according to see that you left school very early.
I did. I did.
Ye. What year of schooling did you finish?
Year ten nineteen eighty at Nurser District High School in Kiroi on the Sunshine Coast. I did year eight, seventy eight, seventy nine and nineteen eighty. So I left school at
year ten at fifteen. And of course my dad was a builder, and he always used to try and encourage me to get into building, carpentry whatever, and I didn't like the idea of working outside in the hot, so I became a wood machinist and I got an apprenticeship as soon as I left school as a wood machinist in Page Furnaces in Pomona, which is a small town
north of Kuroi where I went to school. And I went there and there was a there was a big, big furniture factory that a government contract, and for the next four years I learned the trade of a wood machinist, and nine to eighty five I graduated with my trade certificate as a wood machinist.
Still on the tools a bit. It's an interesting thing to me here though you've left school very early and very young, yet what you're doing now is extremely complex, sophisticated work. So clearly you had the aptitude to go on and study at a high level if you wanted to, But obviously school didn't appeal didn't.
No, And I think the type of work we do, you've got to be a good writer. You've got to be able to express yourself. You've got to be able to write reports and put intelligence together. You've certainly got to have a skill set. You've got to be educated and be able to write well in this job. But the rest of it really boils down to experience. And you know, a lot of probably ninety percent of the work we do is really knowing what to do and
how to do it, So that comes from experience. But I was never really a person that was very interested in school. My life skills were taught at a very young age. I was driving at twelve, I was riding motorbikes, driving my full By first bulldozer at d six. At the age of thirteen, I drove my first Kenworth truck at the age of twelve, a big semi trailer, like a huge semi I'd kind of done it all by the age of thirteen. In the bush, just.
I want to wrap up in a moment with the sort of takeaway points because a lot of people will be watching this and listening to this because they want to make themselves safer or because they have been scammed. But just mentioned Peter Foster a moment, probably Australia's most famous con man, describes himself as an international man of mischief. Is he jail at the moment.
By the way, No, he's not. He's on trial for a case of which resulted in him being arrested on the beach in Port Douglas, which everybody has seen the crash tackle on the beach. He's on trial or he's going to trial. He's still going through the courts. But again the Queensland legal system, you know five years now going through the courts was not five years because he
was on the run for a little while. But it takes too long for these cases to go through the courts and the court systems half the problem in this country. But he's going through court and ultimately he'll be heading to trial to be tried on whether or not he committed the fraud that he was alleged to commit which led to his arrest back in twenty twenty.
Okay, look, I really appreciate your time. Let's wrap it up. Let's summarize it. How summary? How do I avoid being scammed on the average person going around the average life? How do I avoid being scammed?
Well, don't invest on the internet. That's the golden rule. I would say to anybody that's wanting to invest, wanting to make money, don't think that you're going to make money on the internet. I don't. I rarely have ever met in my thirty seven years of doing this job, I have rarely met anybody that has actually made money by investing in a some sort of scheme that involves something online. So my best advice is just don't invest.
And if you are going to invest into something like a bank bond or a term deposit, do extensive due diligence and speak to professional advisors, accountants, lawyers, investigators, even speak to people and do a fair bit of due diligence before you invest in any type of investment. That's the number that is the golden rule, essentially is because that's where everyone gets caught lack of due diligence and lack of awareness.
And do we expect and you predict scams become more devial to pick. They only become more sophisticated. They're going to grow. I mean, we're stuck with this, aren't we.
Well, we're going to see we're already seeing it, the scams morphing into different types scam types. So we're going to we're probably going to see the classic cryptocurrency trading platform that's going to slow down dramatically, already has. The celebrity adverts are going to change. They won't be necessarily celebrities anymore. They will morph into something different. There's going to be different methodology, you know, years to engage with people.
There's going to be a lot more personal engagement by fraudsters, in other words, in real life rather than online. There's going to be a lot more people committing frauds in real time, in real life, actually people coming to meet the victim. Those sort of frauds are on the rise again now, So I think, I think in general, your money is precious, Keep it in the bank, keep it
invested in property. But at the moment you go risking your investment into something that has a high interest rate, or something that's online or some particularly cryptocurrency, you know, you're actually uh you're treading on thin ice. If you invest money over the Internet, that's the that's the bottom line.
Well, that's how the victim can avoid being a victim. How can it be better policed? If you could, you could do one thing, and you've made all sorts of comparisons to various areas here about inaction, about warnings, about how long? How many people? God knows how many people have been hurt and scammed and become victims because of official inaction. What would you do? What you're you're running the world? What do you do?
There needs to be better policing on the on the Internet. There needs to be more regulation around people using services online. Ultimately, there should be some sort of you know, national identity. I think we all should be identified by our face and our fingerprint.
Oh should have an identity, national identity card.
Yeah, and that that and that identity then accesses your use of the Internet, and everyone that has that uses the internet. Because the Internet was set up for to create freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of everything you know, and that was the whole purpose. And of course criminals have now used it for nefarious purposes. So I think there needs to be a lot more regulation around the Internet moving forward into the future where it has to be policed a lot more because no one's policing the
Internet as a whole. Nobody. There's no national or international global law enforcement agency that is policing the Internet as a whole, and that's the problem.
Just just flesh out that idea on the card. How would that work? You'd need an authority to use the Internet?
Well, you know, it's not a bad idea, but of course people will argue, well, that's an invasion of privacy where people want to be free to do whatever they like. But when you're dealing with the amount of crime that's online, you know, and there's always going to be people that will never agree. That's the problem. We live in society where people enjoy their freedom. They don't want to be having to put their fingerprint into access the Internet. But
I think that there should be. I would love to see most self personally, based on everything that I've seen, I'd love to see when you log into the Internet to use the Internet, that you're identified that your face and your fingerprint, just like when you go to a crypto company and you buy cryptocurrency, they have to identify your face and your fingerprint, and they have to identify you and in order to use cryptocurrency, So why should
it be a different to the Internet. You should be identified in order to use the Internet and get access to all of those services. It's a simple identification of who you are when you log in, your identity is logged in. Of course it can be exploited, but it would be a good start. Probably never could be implemented, but I think that's one way of starting to enforce the law when it comes to Internet and actually regulating the use of the Internet. That's the only real way.
Look what they've done to social media, banning children under sixteen from social media. That was unheard of a few years ago, that no one would ever believe that could be possible in this country, you know, and now it's happening because of the amount of crime that's been committed against children.
Just a final thing that comes to mind just as you're talking. Then, I assume a lot of maybe a majority of the victims or older people are they are not sufficiently internet or savvy, or suspicious or cynical about being approached. That'd be true, would it?
Absolutely? For fifty years upwards, a majority of serious frauds that we deal with from fifty fifty to seventy age group, and then there's even I think our oldest victims eighty three at the moment, but from from fifty to seventy and then there's an then there's this seventy up age group as well, but from fifty onwards is the most vulnerable people in Australia.
Well, maybe were meant to be targeting that. Maybe it exists. I haven't seen it, but we should be targeting that age group specifically with warnings, with the education campaigns, with advertising.
Correct correct And when you think about it, these are the people that missed the boat that were perhaps not They didn't grow up with the Internet, they didn't grow up with online tools, and they weren't educated kind of that age group. You know, I've been incredibly lucky because when I started in this job, there was no such thing as the Internet. I started nine to eighty eight. We had two way radios, you know, there was no
mobile phones, no internet, nothing. So I've come all of a sudden in ninety one, when computers even just came out, you know, all of a sudden, I've started at the very birth of the computer age. And the birth of the Internet was around ninety one. That's when sort of Google started ninety one ninety two, and that's when internet crime started. So I've been, in a way lucky to have been born into into investigating internet crime from the birth of internet crime, and that thirty seven years later,
I'm still doing it. And that's the reason why I've got so much experience. People say, how do you do this? How do you go into a foreign country and arrest eighty people under the nase of corrupt police or whatever? And it's because I've been doing this since day one,
So it takes a lot of experience. But unfortunately, law enforcement come in and out of their positions and their roles, and someone that's an expert at in that crime this week may not be an expert next week because they've been shifted to another department of the police or next year. So there's no long term investigators that are doing this type of work. That's the problem. There's no specialists around
the world. The FBI told me that recently there's very few around the world that have specialized in this area over a long period of time, and that's pretty sad. But we have to create more and more of those sorts.
Of people sad and dangerous. I agree with you. I appreciate your time, and let's hope we've maps helped a few people avoid becoming victims at least and maybe even woken up a couple of politicians. That'll be a.
Change, I certainly hope, so Nil Thank.
You, Ken Gamble. Thanks, thank you very much, Ken Gamble. Ifw global Ken Gamble. Now, just before I leave you to your life, I want to first can congratulate you on showing the good sense to listen to my podcast. Neil Mitchell asks, why there's one rule to this podcast. It's got to be interesting and different. I always try to get inside the head of the person I'm talking to before I go. I wanted to take a moment to thank Three point Motors the Mercedes dealers, for their
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