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Australian sleuth bringing major scam gangs to justice

I discovered a way to identify the millions of species on Earth after a lightbulb moment in the supermarket Guardian

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Grace M. Christensen, Zhenjiang Li, Donghai Liang, Stefanie Ebelt, Marla Gearing, Allan I. Levey, James J. Lah, Aliza Wingo, Thomas Wingo, Anke Hüls. Association of PM 2.5 Exposure and Alzheimer Disease Pathology in Brain Bank Donors—Effect Modification by APOE Genotype. Neurology, 2024; 102 (5)

“People with higher exposure to traffic-related air pollution were more likely to have high amounts of amyloid plaques in their brains associated with Alzheimer’s disease after death, according to a new study. Researchers looked at fine particulate matter, PM2.5, which consists of pollutant particles of less than 2.5 microns in diameter suspended in air.”

Australian sleuth bringing major scam gangs to justice

The private investigator is something of an online Robin Hood, often outnumbered and always outgunned while seeking justice for ordinary people ripped off by scoundrels.

Yet his merry band of men, armed with specialist skills honed over many years, stick it to the bad guys and reunite victims with their stolen cash.

In news reports of cybercrime busts over the past decade, there is often a regular bloke looking rather pleased amid armed police in balaclavas and panic-stricken fraudsters in handcuffs.

That's Ken Gamble.

He has been in the game for more than three decades and is co-founder of private cybercrime investigation unit IFW Global.

Mr Gamble takes on private cases, investigates and builds evidence before taking the matters to local law enforcement. He'll join raids, watch arrests and then appear in court as an expert witness.

From the initial complaint to sentencing, the Australian investigator is front and centre.

So there's perhaps nobody better to share insights on the growing menace of online scams and financial cybercrime, particularly those using supposed huge returns from cryptocurrency investment as a lure.

"There's three main nationalities in the world that are now dominating the crypto scam space," said Mr Gamble, who spoke to AAP as part of AAP FactCheck's investigation into crypto scams in the Pacific.

"The Israelis, they're probably number one ... then the Chinese and the Nigerians."

For anyone who has fallen victim or seen a scam online, it likely originated from organised criminal groups from one of those three nations, Mr Gamble says.

Each has its own modus operandi.

The Israelis are the most sophisticated, Mr Gamble says, targeting high-value victims in places like Australia, often for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

The Chinese are all about volume and typically mass-produce unsophisticated content with the intention of getting smaller amounts, perhaps tens of thousands, from each victim.

The Nigerians are at the lowest end of the scale, gouging maybe $5000 from each victim.

"The Nigerians are not in Lagos anymore," said Mr Gamble, referring to the African nation's largest city.

"They're operating out of South Africa ... they've got compounds, secure compounds, well protected by security.

"They're operating in gangs of hundreds of people."

The one thing online scammers have in common is scale.

They tend not to be lone operators, but are instead huge organisations that spend millions on infrastructure and have their own IT security departments.

"The Israelis have huge call centres; 200 people ringing bells to celebrate whenever they scam someone," Mr Gamble said.

"They're celebrating the misery of cleaning people's wallets out. They're evil people."

Many of these operations also have small armies of people looking for ways to promote their scam.

"They have people who spend all day, every day, on Facebook, scanning all these groups," Mr Gamble said.

"They reach out to people, they promote their platforms, they invite people, they have people just there to put fake stories up about how they made all this money.

"It's that old-fashioned way where they'll reach out and bait someone. 'Oh, gee, that sounds good. Can you get me into that?'.

"It's all lies, the whole industry is filled by criminals."

Such is the growth of the industry, off-the-shelf scam packages are also now sold on the dark web.

"You can buy a platform, buy all the infrastructure to set up your own scam," Mr Gamble said.

A victim could be scammed by a low-level criminal operating out of their garage, but it might ultimately be through a product associated with one of the organised groups.

While Mr Gamble's unit does not have the extensive powers of a national police force, he has the flexibility to follow the breadcrumbs wherever they take him.

He has tracked down scammers in Serbia, the Philippines Kim and Cyprus and is currently homing in on operations in South Africa and Ukraine.

"We gather evidence on the ground and then we go to the police and say 'we have all this evidence'," he said.

"Once they verify it all, they then apply for a search warrant. A judge can cross-examine me about the case and about what evidence I've found and why I believe these people are doing what they're doing. And then if the judge is satisfied, she or he stamps the search warrant application."

Once an operations team is briefed and ready, Mr Gamble joins the raid and if needed, will appear in court as an expert witness.

One of his more notable investigations resulted in a series of raids in Malaysia in 2023 involving more than 80 arrests, the seizure of $4.3 million and freezing of 54 bank accounts.

It was a satisfying conclusion to three years' work.

With the bad guys in cuffs and his clients' money returned, the job is done for Mr Gamble.

But for all the success stories, many more scammers are getting away with it.

Mr Gamble says not enough is being done by law enforcement both in Australia and abroad.

"It has left a trail of devastation and destruction across our country," he said of the human impact of the crimes.

"Hundreds of people, thousands of people devastated, some of them taking their life because of the pain and suffering that they've had to endure."

Lifeline 13 11 14

DOJ funding pipeline subsidizes questionable big data surveillance technologies – Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson discusses how predictive policing has been shown to be an ineffective and biased policing tool. Yet, the Department of Justice has been funding the crime surveillance and analysis technology for years and continues to do so despite criticism from researchers, privacy advocates and members of Congress. Guthrie’s research reveals an entire ecosystem of how technology companies, police departments and academics benefit from the flow of federal dollars for these surveillance technologies.

Chartered Accountants mistakenly let ex-PwC partner avoid investigation

TPB to wrap up nine PwC investigations by December 

Chartered Accountants mistakenly let ex-PwC partner avoid investigation

Chartered Accountants ANZ accidently allowed Peter Collins to avoid investigation by its disciplinary committee by letting him cancel his membership.

This was even though the former PwC partner told the professional body he was “subject to an investigation” by the tax agents’ regulator.

Mr Collins’ disclosure about the Tax Practitioners Board investigation into his activities while at PwC in his November 2022 resignation email should have triggered a process at CA ANZ that flagged his membership and prevented him from resigning before the body investigated.

Peter Collins, former head of international tax for PwC Australia. 

The error meant that Mr Collins, who was deregistered by the TPB for two years last January and has since been banned from providing financial services for eight years by the corporate regulator, could not be investigated by the accounting body.

It also means that senior executives of the professional body inaccurately told two parliamentary inquiries they only found out about TPB investigation into Mr Collins after it was first by The Australian Financial Review last January.

The error was discovered after Mr Collins emailed CA ANZ chief executive Ainslie van Onselen last Sunday, February 25, to inform her of the existence of his November 2022 resignation letter with its TPB investigation. On Tuesday, she wrote to the two committees to correct the body’s testimony and to explain how Mr Collins had been mistakenly allowed to resign.

The debacle is another blow to the professional body’s ongoing attempts to reform its disciplinary processes so that it is seen by its members, the parliament and the public as capable of policing chartered accountants, a group which include the partners of the big four consulting firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC. The body has since changed its rules to prevent former members from escaping investigation over alleged misconduct.

It also comes after ASIC chairman Joe Longo told parliament that the corporate regulator only has oversight of a “sliver” of the services provided by the big four because partnerships are not covered by federal corporate laws. This mistake will serve to add further weight to a growing push to bring the big four under federal laws.

‘No flag on his record’

Ms van Onselen’s wrote that “human error” by CA ANZ’s membership team “erroneously” allowed Mr Collins to cancel his membership despite his resignation email specifying that he was being investigated by the TPB.

“On the evening of Sunday, 25 February 2024, I received an email directly from Mr Collins, where he shared with me this correspondence dated 16 November 2022 which he sent to the generic CA ANZ email address used for Membership and Admissions queries and requests,” she wrote.

“The existence of this correspondence was not previously known to...me. Because Mr Collins had not disclosed via the proper channels, there was no flag on his record, which means his resignation was not properly assessed nor brought to the attention of the Professional Conduct Committee, nor to line managers.

Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand CEO Ainslie van Onselen. Christopher Pearce

Mr Collins’ email was sent on the same day the TPB made its findings into his actions and actions by PwC relating to the tax leaks matter.

The TPB took the unprecedented step of terminating his registration as a tax agent after a lengthy investigation found he had shared secret information about the government’s tax plans to other partners and staff at PwC, despite signing a series of confidentiality agreements with Treasury from 2013 to 2018.

In her letter, Ms van Onselen wrote that Mr Collins had not submitted a formal ‘Notification Event’ about his TPB investigation as required by the body’s bylaws. Instead, he “had disclosed he was subject to an investigation from the TPB via an informal channel” in his resignation email.

“While Mr Collins did not disclose the TPB findings against him to the PCC as required by the CA ANZ By-Laws, he had provided a disclosure in a resignation letter received and processed by the Membership and Admissions team...in late November 2022,” she wrote.

CA ANZ is unable to reverse Mr Collins’ resignation. Instead, Ms van Onselen wrote the body has already put a ‘stop resignation’ notification on the unspecified number of current and former PwC Australia partners it is investigating over the tax leaks matter.

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The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) has defended its chief executive officer from accusations of conflicts of interest following a fresh round of media reports on its handling of the PwC tax leaks investigation.

Tax Practitioners Board chief executive has no conflict of interest, de Cure says

TPB to wrap up nine PwC investigations by December

Edmund Tadros

The Tax Practitioners Board aims to have its nine separate investigations into the PwC tax leaks scandal completed by the end of this year.

Chairman Peter de Cure told a Thursday-morning hearing of the joint inquiry into the structure of the big four partnerships that the investigations were “progressing well”.

“[We] have nine ongoing investigations in relation to the PwC matter [and] those investigations are progressing well,” de Cure said.

“We have a fixed plan as to how those will proceed from here, and we would expect all of those investigations to be concluded in the course of this calendar year. And we hope to make significant progress towards the middle of this calendar year.”

He added that the “relevant” targets of the investigation included current “or former PwC partners”.

TPB chief executive Michael O’Neill said PwC was more co-operative now than when the tax leaks matter was initially investigated.

“Senator [Deborah O’Neill], I think since the first phase of the investigation ... PwC have lent into co-operation and transparency, much more than what was described as a legal and technical approach and the first phase,” O’Neill said.

Ian Bartley Tax Practitioner Board CEO Michael O’Neill has led investigations into PwC seemingly at the expense of any further career prospects at the ATO where he has served faithfully for many years.

Barbara Pocock reveals the “pressure” the ATO applied on TPB’s Michael O’Neill after he was committed to investigate PwC over their Multinational Tax Scandal. Pocock lists multiple unsubstantiated complaints by the ATO against O’Neill, who does not deny any of it🚩#Estimates

 

When the end is in sight, even the most successful careers seem haunted by the specter of failure”

 “When the end is in sight, even the most successful careers seem haunted by the specter of failure”

In antiquity humans were referred to as “mortals,” which meant that they were destined not only to die but also to suffer loss, misfortune, and disaster. By comparison with the immortal gods, even the loftiest mortals are losers in the long run (as Achilles realizes in Hades). In his book In Praise of Failure, the philosopher and essayist Costica Bradatan reminds us that we flash into existence between “two instantiations of nothingness,” namely the nothingness before we were born and the one after we die. Each one of us, ontologically speaking, is next to nothing. And each one of us, despite our precarious condition, has something to lose. “Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature”—all, according to Bradatan, seek to make our next-to-nothingness “a little more bearable.”

 ... In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility »