‘We’re going to have to sell the house’: How an ATO veteran lost $800k
A couple in their 70s were looking forward to a comfortable retirement until a “Mark Hoffman” entered their lives. Four months later, everything was gone
Laurence Friend and his wife Lois. They were targeted by a fake trading platform that drained $800,000 in just four months. Nora Devai
“A dam, we’re going to have to sell the house.”
His mother, Lois, was on the phone, and her panicked confession came as a shock. It was only the first of many that day.
She explained that his father, Laurence, a comfortably retired former tax official in his 70s, had received a letter claiming the couple owed an overseas business about $300,000.
Adam Friend, a former police officer who works in security in Sydney, rushed to his parents’ house in rural NSW. “My parents were at a loss. They collapsed in a heap,” he tells AFR Weekend.
But there were more revelations to come. Examining the letter, Adam saw it alleged his parents had also made investment losses above and beyond the $300,000 bill.
It was then that Adam learnt of Mark Hoffman, Grand Pacific Trade and the investments his father had made and supposedly lost in the past few months. “I had no idea any of this was going on at the time.”
In the following weeks, Adam poured through his parents’ accounts, tracking dozens of payments through local bank branches and into the gaping maw of online cryptocurrency exchanges, where the trail ran cold.
When everything was tallied, the total was shocking. His parents had lost more than $800,000, not through bad investments, but to a scam artist who relentlessly targeted his father – a 30-year veteran of the Australian Taxation Office.
“In my time in the police, we did a lot on anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism finance training. My parents’ accounts looked exactly like the examples in the training,” said Adam.
When Adam told his parents they were almost certainly the victims of a sophisticated online scam, they couldn’t believe what he was telling them, and what it meant for their future.
“They were shocked that the money wasn’t where they thought it was, and they thought, ‘Well, okay, are we going to be homeless now?’ ”
Laurence Friend doesn’t recall the site that he found through an online advertisement, which promised big returns by using sophisticated algorithms to arbitrage cryptocurrency transactions, but he recalls the name of the man who called him some weeks later: Mark Hoffman.
“Mark told me he represented an online trading business, Grand Pacific Trade. He was in an office in London, and he said he drove a Porsche 911, had a wife and two kids,” he says.
Laurence had been searching for new investments since the pair sold their second property a couple of years earlier.
The patriarch had a history of managing the couple’s money well. Before the call with Hoffman, most of his substantial nest egg was held in gold and silver and similarly sound, stable and safe investments.
But Laurence, who had some understanding of arbitrage trading through his time in the tax office, had grown increasingly interested in cryptocurrency. A new investment world to him, but one that he had heard was already paying out substantially for early investors.
Laurence Friend and his wife Lois. Laurence had a history of managing the couple’s money well. Nora Devai
Some years earlier, he says, a family friend had bought a new house outright after selling off a well-timed bet on bitcoin. Hoffman promised that and more through the online trading platform he directed Laurence to access from his home laptop.
“I can’t remember how much the initial amount was, probably about $30,000, and he said if you contributed $250,000 that’s when you got to the maximum percentage out of the deals. He instructed me on what to say to the banks to get the money,” he says.
The first payments went straight from the couple’s Westpac account to an FTX cryptocurrency wallet that Hoffman had set up. From there, payments could be made to the unknown owners of various cryptocurrency wallets around the world.
After that initial payment, Hoffman and Laurence often spoke, sometimes as often as four times a week, discussing the huge gains Laurence had already made through the platform, evidenced by the account’s total, which had more than doubled his initial investment.
When Westpac grew suspicious of the repeated transactions, Hoffman and Laurence began moving to new wallets from a separate account at Bendigo Bank.
“It wasn’t long until I got up to the top tier, where I was expecting we get the maximum deals. He kept on asking for more money, and I, the fool, sent it to him,” he said.
Lois watched her husband speaking each night to this man she had never met and grew increasingly wary.
“This person had complete control over my husband’s attitude about whatever it was that was happening,” she says.
“We’ve been married nearly 52 years, and he was not listening to me. This person had convinced him he was onto something that was going to be very successful.”
Hoffman, sensing Lois’ hesitancy, began to make efforts to reassure the couple, in one instance sending back $30,000 of Laurence’s supposed investment gains to purchase a new car and go on a night out.
Reassured, Laurence immediately re-invested that money into the platform without spending a cent.
Several weeks later, there were the first signs that something was afoot.
“I had been monitoring the online account with [Grand Pacific Trade], and all of a sudden, it had a big loss for no reason,” said Laurence.
Adam Friend, a former police officer, with his parents at their home in NSW. They have done more than many to trace and catalogue their victimisation at the hands of the Olympus Prime scam centre. Nora Devai
Those losses compounded. Soon Laurence’s account was well below the amount he had initially put in, but Hoffman continued to encourage him to invest more, promising the latest deals would help recoup the paper fortune that was slipping through his fingers.
When the account finally recovered to about $300,000, Laurence attempted to pull the money out.
It was then, after months of speaking one-on-one almost every night, that Hoffman cut contact with Laurence. The entire platform disappeared shortly after. Weeks later, the fabricated court order arrived, prompting Laurence’s son, Adam, to learn everything.
From the first call in May 2022 until the last one in October, it took just over four months for Hoffman to siphon three decades of life savings from the retired couple.
In a squat office on the sixth floor adjacent to a Chinese cultural centre in Belgrade, Serbia, the man claiming to be Mark Hoffman hangs up the phone on Laurence Friend for the last time.
Hoffman’s real name, alleged in the subsequent court documents, is Dusan Lukic. He is one of 16 people charged in association with the Olympus Prime scam centre after the site was raided just months after Lukic cut contact with Laurence.
It was one of 22 sites raided by German police on January 11, 2023.
This year, an investigation by The Australian Financial Review, in collaboration with Investigate Europe and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, linked the operators of Olympus Prime to a global criminal syndicatestretching through Europe, Israel and Australia.
Laurence’s contact details were found in a seized client database containing more than 100,000 names – almost 40,000 of them based in Australia, a known lucrative market for international scam networks.
Australians lose significantly more money per person to scams than citizens of almost any other nation thanks to a high level of wealth, particularly for retirees with superannuation lump sums, and the widespread adoption of digital payments making transfers instantaneous.
But if the Friends hoped the police raid would bring an end to their trouble, they were mistaken.
With the help of Adam, Laurence and Lois have done more than many to trace and catalogue their victimisation at the hands of the Olympus Prime scam centre.
Their testimony to police and detailed accounts, along with the efforts of nine other Australians, helped bring charges against Lukic in February 2023.
Dozens more people have helped bring charges against Lukic’s alleged co-conspirators. Still, even with charges made, Adam’s legal counsel in Europe believes it could be as long as a decade before any money can be recovered, if at all.
Neither the banks that allowed the repeated ransacking of the Friends’ savings nor the cryptocurrency exchanges that enabled that money to slip into an untraceable and unregulated network of digital wallets can be legally held responsible, leaving the criminals themselves as the only hope the Friends have to recover funds.
Despite the crackdown on the Belgrade operation, thousands of Australians continue to fall victim to similar scams each year.
Last month, the National Anti-Scam Centre contacted more than 10,000 Australians via email after they were identified by a United Kingdom police investigation into organised crime targeting digital wallet users in multiple countries.
“While arrests have been made, affected Australians may remain at risk of further scam attempts because their personal information may still be circulating among criminal networks,” said a spokesman for the organisation.
The Friends face a more insecure future than the one they imagined before 2022. Nora Devai
Four years on since Adam received that first phone call from his mother, he remains hopeful that some of their life savings can be recovered, and continues to encourage others who believe they’ve been victims of scammers to make themselves known to authorities.
“The more people who come forward, the better it is for everyone,” he says.
His parents, meanwhile, are mulling an insecure future, one very different from that which was laid out before them just a few years ago.
“He was out to get our money. He knew how much we had, and he didn’t stop until it was gone,” says Lois. “Here we are in our 70s, and we’re going to live fortnight to fortnight again for the rest of our lives.”
Nevertheless, she’s sure others who fell victim to “Mark” or the many like him may be far worse off.
“We’ve managed to keep our house and carry on, but there could be people who’ve lost their homes,” she said.
“Their retirement is gone. What do they do now? Their future has been robbed.
“He took our nest egg that we wanted to one day to leave to our children and grandchildren and live very comfortably for the rest of our lives – it looks like that isn’t going to happen now.”
