Alex Brooks 0:01

Money isn't everything, but if your profession

revolves around finance, it kind of is. When 

stockbrokers, chartered accountants or economics

professors are blindsided by digital bank robbery, 

it's not just theft. It creates a crisis of faith,

a betrayal of the very skills that helped these 

people earn money in the first place. Now, finance

professionals may know how to manage money better 

than the average person, but in Australia's Swiss

cheese electronic payment systems, their money 

can be stolen just as easily as everybody else's.

Ken Gamble 0:40

This has become the most

profitable crime on earth because it's such a high 

profit crime and such a low risk. Three people

Alex Brooks 0:47

with careers in finance, $5 million

stolen through digital bank robbery, a lifetime 

of savings gone. The people you'll meet in this

episode were hoodwinked by criminals who laundered 

their stolen millions through Australian banks.

This isn't just a scam victim's worst nightmare. 

It affects all of us, because when the system

fails, who should foot the bill? The people you're 

about to meet were some of Australia's highest

paying taxpayers, but cyber-enabled banking fraud 

stole millions from them, and now it's everyday

people like you and I that will likely have 

to pick up the bill for their age pension. You

Kessada Sawyer 1:27

know, we have to rely

on government pension fund, and that 

is something that we have worked both

of us have worked so hard we saved every 

cent. This should not happen to us. This

Alex Brooks 1:38

is episode seven

of daylight robbery. I'm Alex Brooks. In 

the cat and mouse game of industrial scale

banking fraud. The cat is winning, and it's 

taxpayers that are going to end up paying.

Kessada Sawyer 1:53

I have now been retired

for more than 15 years, but in my previous life, 

I used to be a fund manager and a stock broker.

Alex Brooks 2:03

Kessada Sawyer and

her husband, Kim, a university professor,

are some of the many retired Australians who've 

been devastated by bank impersonation scams.

Kim Sawyer 2:12

We lost

two and a half million dollars 

and it was all laundered. Most

Alex Brooks 2:17

of us think older

people lose money to scams because they 

don't know how to use technology, but that

ageist trope needs rethinking. Term Deposit 

scams, screen takeover, thefts, fake bonds,

AI trading and romance cons are just some of the 

schemes stealing from Australians through our

banking system. Older Australians are especially 

targeted by cunning criminals who know Australia's

uniquely wealthy superannuation system is a honey 

pot of $4 trillion just waiting to be stolen. Now,

Sylvia Chou is not old enough to retire, but she 

is staring down an uncertain financial future. The

Accountant was hooked back in 2019 by a fake 

Facebook ad that ended with NAB releasing more

than $1.4 million of refinanced mortgage money to 

an Australian company called How to Pay billing.

Sylvia Chou 3:13

Now I'm bearing with

1 million debts and the potential bankruptcy 

which bring me with no future. I can't continue

practice as a public accountant. I can't 

continue as a registered tax agent. All

Alex Brooks 3:31

up, Sylvia has lost

more than $2.6 million including a $750,000 

interest bill from banks, Westpac and NAB few

Sylvia Chou 3:42

times I was thinking suicide,

because I can't see the hope. I really 

can't see the lights. Yeah, no business,

no money. Family breakdown. I don't 

know what, what else left for me as

Alex Brooks 3:56

a single mother who had

to borrow money from family and friends after a 

2019, fraud, Sylvia's kids are no longer in close

contact. The banks are chasing her in court to 

repay money, and if Sylvia is made bankrupt, her

professional registration will be struck off. That 

means she'll need to rely on government support to

Sylvia Chou 4:17

live. How they affect me,

like I said, family fall part kids were not in 

the position to understand what I go through.

Alex Brooks 4:26

Australia's banks, mobile phone networks

and digital economy is littered with fakes 

and frauds and very few consumer protections.

Australian laws and regulations haven't kept up 

with fast changing technology that allows business

people to exploit loopholes. Last episode, I 

revealed Australian mule bank accounts receiving

scammed or laundered money can be traded for as 

little as $50 through Facebook. Fraud detection

company Biocatch found more than 2 million 

mule bank accounts across the globe in 2024

in. While banks admit that scams and fraud are 

increasingly sophisticated, they won't admit

it's their staff who are often the first people 

duped in a world of fastchanging and complex

fraud. In fact, Australian Banking Association 

CEO Anna Bligh told the Senate "Overwhelmingly,

ABA Anna Bligh 5:16

scams come to customers

through their telephone through their 

social media platforms, through emails,

scams do not come to customers through 

their bank account or their banking app.

Alex Brooks 5:28

Now this is a bit of a furphy. It is

bank tellers and customer service staff, just like 

victims who are tricked, usually before a scam has

even begun. For example, teller staff unwittingly 

set up meule accounts with fake or forged identity

documents, and it's bank staff that approve 

transactions over $10,000 to be sent overseas,

usually in contradiction of Australia's counter 

terrorism financing and money laundering laws.

Kim Sawyer 5:56

Because we need

to understand that the strategy 

of the banks and the scammers are

the same. They want to blame the victims, 

because that gets them off the hook. Kim

Alex Brooks 6:07

and kKessada were tricked by a fake St George bank

website and a team of overseas based scammers, 

yes, those nice men with British accents, who used

Australian phone numbers and real bank employees 

names stolen from LinkedIn to help the Sawyers

move their money to the safety of a very fake term 

deposit. The Sawyers were conned over a period of

three to four months. The irony of their scam was 

that banks recovered $15,000 but only because the

scammers threatened legal action and AFCA made 

the banks pay it back to Kim and Kessada. They

Kim Sawyer 6:42

gave the money

to the scammer when they knew it was a scam.

Kessada Sawyer 6:45

So the scammer complained

to AFCA and made and threatened legal 

action, legal action to a Westpac,

and Westpac released the money to their scam 

knowing full well it was that it was a scam.

Alex Brooks 6:59

Yes, you heard that,

right? The scammer took legal action against 

banks for holding up their money, and that's

because the scammers open business accounts 

that pretend to be legitimate. These scammers

don't walk around with the word criminal tattooed 

to their forehead, but under the banking code,

all Australian banks are supposed to have well 

trained staff who should be able to spot these

crooks. Yet, fraudulent transfers are 

approved by bank staff all the time,

even when it's clear the name doesn't match 

the account or the customer believes they're

opening a St George term deposit with 

a NAB or Westpac BSB number. When you

Kim Sawyer 7:37

think of that example where

a scammer can threaten legal action and complain 

to AFCA and get the money out of their account,

even when the bank knows it's a scam. 

What the hell is going on? I mean,

where are the where are the 

lines of the sand? There

Simon Smith 7:51

is no protection. If you send

a million dollars to a different bank, it's like 

it's gone, you know, and it's untraceable. That's

Alex Brooks 7:57

Simon Smith, a forensic cyber crime expert who

says banks and financial firms have virtually no 

duty of care to prevent fraud or mistaken payments

on behalf of customers. Yet, if you the customer 

receive money in your bank account by mistake and

then spend it, you're the one who could go 

to jail. That's precisely what happened to

a Melbourne couple after a Bulgarian crypto firm 

mistakenly put 10 and a half million dollars into

their CommBank account, a couple spent that 

money, and Jatinder Singh is now spending

three years in jail for dealing with proceeds 

of crime and theft from CommBank for withdrawing

the money. So there's one rule for banks making 

mistaken payments, and another for customers. Now,

Australian banks do, thankfully try to 

recall and recover scammed money. We've

Kim Sawyer 8:48

since recovered

$187,000 but that's it, and it was only 

because it was left in a mule account,

and we don't even know that it was our 

money, but we got the money back, but Kim

Alex Brooks 9:00

and Kessada have

no ability to check the accuracy of the amounts 

that AFCA says have been recovered. Banks could,

in fact, recover more money and simply keep it 

for themselves. There's no one policing the banks,

and the banks say it's privacy rules that 

prevent them making these numbers transparent,

but investigator Ken Gamble says the 

privacy rules are a convenient excuse.

Ken Gamble 9:23

They're hiding because

of the liability aspect. They're keeping it 

within the confines of their own bank because

if they start giving this data out, then it could 

make them all of a sudden liable for lawsuits.

Alex Brooks 9:41

Now, back in the 70s, 80s and into the 90s,

and 2000s banks did do manual settlements and 

authorizations. That was why bank branches closed

at 3pm bank staff didn't go home for the day 

until all daily transactions had been tallied,

balanced and settled, because if the bank got 

the numbers wrong, the bank wore the loss. Now,

just as handling all that cash made banks targets 

for violent armed robberies, cash also made sure

banks checked and double checked everything. Now, 

banks no longer transfer real currency or cash.

It's just numbers updated on a computer screen, 

authorized by some anonymous bank employee,

rather than a teller. You can look in 

the eye at a branch. Electronic payments

and transfers are leaking money to thieves 

here in Australia and over thieves, online

Kim Sawyer 10:32

fraud. The reason I think it's happening

is because online transactions suit the banks. 

They get money out of that. We know that they're

closing branches. They're closing your contact 

with people. So the money that we've got left,

we're now absolutely determined to have 

a person that we deal with now and not

online. So they get away with it because it's 

in their interest to have online transactions,

and what they're doing is they're 

not taking the risk responsibility.

Alex Brooks 11:09

Now, banks claim Austrac

and privacy rules prevent them telling customers 

what's really going on with their money once it's

transferred into the electronic banking system. 

Yet police subpoena this information all the time,

and this information is also protected 

and can't be disclosed to victims.

Kim Sawyer 11:27

We had two and a half million dollars stolen

from our house. Everyone will look at it entirely 

differently. It's because with a financial crime,

somehow, the very fact that you click on a link 

or click on that you you know we only ever got

one phone call from a bank to ask us whether 

we authorized this transfer. We authorized the

transfer that we authorized the transfer into 

our name, not the name of a of a scammer. Most

Alex Brooks 12:00

of us unconsciously

assume older Australians struggle to use 

technology, making them easy targets for scams,

but the truth is that digital bank robbery 

is costing victims staggering amounts,

with losses reaching eye watering figures 

that go beyond struggling with technology.

Simon Smith 12:19

It's funny, because I

remember the days when scams used to be that you 

trick someone into spending 20 bucks over here,

or you gift cards and stuff. I was always 

all through the 2010s I was all into that

and investigating big time more than 

now. But now they just pretend to be

a bank and take your investment, yeah, or 

your house for your mortgage you know, so,

okay, you want a term deposit, no problem. We can 

sign up for three years. Give us 2 million banks

Alex Brooks 12:47

now. Australian Banking

Association, CEO Anna Bligh says banks do 

try to stop suspicious or scam transfers,

but it's customers who insist the bank should 

follow their instructions. Banks really

ABA Anna Bligh 13:01

have no legal grounds on which they

can refuse to transfer the money belongs to the 

customer, and if the customer insists against all

advice on transferring the funds, there really is 

no grounds on which a bank can refuse to do that.

Alex Brooks 13:15

But when accountant Sylvia Chou was in the midst

of a highly organized cryptocurrency trading scam 

in 2019 her bank NAB did not, in fact, warn her

she was experiencing a scam. They actually laughed 

at her. The bank also claimed they didn't have

her phone number, so they couldn't possibly call 

her up to warn her anyway. So it all started when

Sylvia saw this Facebook ad from the TV show Shark 

Tank, talking about a new way to trade. Sylvia

wanted to know more. She had traded online before, 

and was keen to see how this new platform worked.

So what began with one $250 trade in February 

2019, unraveled into an extreme $2.6 million loss.

Sylvia Chou 13:59

I am a qualified accountant,

and I'm a registered tax agent, and I did 

trading in 2006 as well. So this is not the

first time I did the trading. Unfortunately, this 

is the first time I fall into scam. Sylvia was

Alex Brooks 14:16

trading with a platform called Blue Lexus,

but it was a commbank business account called How 

to Pay Billing that received the money from her

NAB bank account to pay for the trades, and 

this Blue Lexus gave her free bonus trades,

and they told Sylvia that their policy insisted 

she has to pay back the bonus trades before she

can withdraw her profits. Now this is actually 

a common social engineering trick, similar to

the one Loretta experienced in Episode Four. But 

Sylvia didn't know that back in 2019 so she kept

trading for another three months, believing she 

had made two and a half million dollars. And at

the time, she really thought all she had to do 

was pay a million dollar margin costs. All to

get her two and a half million dollars out of the 

platform. So Sylvia went to NAB to explain this,

and asked if she could borrow the 

money, but the bank laughed at

Sylvia Chou 15:09

her. I said, I got

the money sitting overseas, and trading is about 

2.5 million sitting there, but I need the money

to unlock my account so I can cash out all the 

profit I made it in the trading and the person

in NAB just laughed at me, and she said, if you 

have so much money, why you need more money?

Alex Brooks 15:32

Instead of explaining

that Sylvia had fallen victim to a very common 

type of investment and trading scam, NAB just

told her they couldn't help. So then Sylvia 

went to Westpac, who agreed to refinance her

three properties so she could access that money 

to get her trading profits released. The problem,

well, that refinanced mortgage money 

was paid earlier than Sylvia expected,

so within three hours of it hitting her nap 

account, it had been released to the scammers,

Sylvia Chou 16:01

within three hours,

less than three hours, hundreds 

transactions from NAB's account

to the scammer. And according to NAB 

that's beyond their detective strategy.

Alex Brooks 16:14

It took weeks for Sylvia

to untangle what had actually gone on and when 

she didn't get her trading profits released,

a kind neighbour took a look at everything to 

explain she'd likely fallen victim to what's

known as an unlicensed trading scam. Sure 

enough, a few months later, ASIC published

a warning about Blue Lexus, banning banks from 

making payments to it. But that was too late for

Sylvia. As soon as ASIC shuts down scams like 

Blue Lexus three new ones with different names

and more convincing Facebook ads pop up to steal 

more from unwitting Australians like Gary Meachin,

who lives in the New South Wales town of Broke 

and is well broke, he lost $461,000 of his life

savings to the same type of investment scam. 

Sylvia was conned by Gary was hooked in by an

Elon Musk Facebook ad, not Shark Tank. And his 

trading company was called Blue Star and rock

coins, not Blue Lexus. Gary started with a 

small trade and began transferring money,

eventually making profits of 400 or $500 a day. 

He also re joined X, formerly known as Twitter,

and had the man himself, Elon Musk, along 

with Elon Musk's brother and Elon Musk's wife,

messaging him about his trading now, money 

is a powerful social engineering tool that

encourages people to share more information 

about themselves with their friendly account

managers who call regularly over the phone 

from what looks like an Australian number to

chat and extract more information about what other 

assets or money their clients can put into trading

Gary meachen 17:54

platforms. When you

get the taste of it, when 

you're making good money,

the brain goes in a different direction. 

That goes, I like this. Over four

Alex Brooks 18:06

months, the trading

platform gave Gary bonus trades and moved him 

up from bronze level through to silver and gold.

Gary meachen 18:13

And then you get the discount,

and then the money comes through, and it's huge,

and it lands in your in your platform, and 

you go, Whoa. This is something else. When

Alex Brooks 18:23

Gary tried to withdraw his profits

like Sylvia, the platform insists those bonus 

trades and gifts have to be paid back. First,

Gary meachen 18:31

we got caught in in the blockchain contract,

yeah, we had to ever pay gas fees and all this 

stuff. And the guy was so convincing, banks

Alex Brooks 18:43

now refuse to release

funds to crypto platforms and limit how much 

people can spend on crypto. But that doesn't

help if the funds initially go to a bank account. 

ABA CEO, Anna Bligh, told the Senate that new

banking limits have decreased the extreme 

losses. People like Sylvia and Gary experienced

ABA Anna Bligh 19:04

investment scams,

and that's where the most money is lost, and 

that's that's dropped somewhere around 60%

those investment scams using crypto platforms. 

So that's why banks say, let's make sure that

the customer never sees the scam in the first 

place. That's the best way of protecting them,

Alex Brooks 19:21

but it's all too

little too late for Gary and 

Sylvia and Kim and Kessada.

Neither of those people lost money because they 

didn't know how to use technology. They were being

manipulated by powerful international organized 

crime that no government has been willing or

able to stop and these financial crimes aren't 

really just about money. They're about power

too. And what could be more disempowering than 

for a finance professional to lose everything

after months of gas lighting and deception by 

organized crime as well as their own bank. For

Kessada Sawyer 20:01

months on end, I literally felt that I was dead.

I was like I could not function. I lost all my 

confidence. I relied totally on Kim to support me.

I literally felt like I was a dead person, totally 

alienated from the rest of the society, and

Alex Brooks 20:21

that difficulty

finding justice compounds the trauma, because

Kim Sawyer 20:26

not only are we up against the scammers,

we're up against the banks and we're up against 

the authorities as well. So it was, it was sort

of like written for us that, you know, that's 

what we're up against. The scam didn't end on

October the sixth last year. Well, I wouldn't say 

it started on October the sixth, but it was almost

like that. The deception since there's been as bad 

as the original scam, there's no question about it

worse worse. We just feel we've been deceived 

by everyone. No one's telling the truth to us.

Gary meachen 20:58

This digital thing is a trap,

basically, and I think older people can't handle 

it, and I think Australia will just turn into

everybody, scamming everybody. Everybody's 

scamming each other because it's normal now,

Speaker 1 21:10

banks, telcos and big

tech don't want scammers or criminals on their 

platforms, but are they working hard enough to

take them out? Tech company lobbyist Sunita 

Bose, who represents Facebook and Google,

says every scam relies on complex but mostly legal 

attack chains scammers. In order to be successful,

need to build a web across exploiting 

various services that Australians use

every day they start by building the financial 

infrastructure in which to receive funds,

often through offshore bank accounts or 

cryptocurrency. They then build legitimacy,

often sometimes by creating fake ABNs or building 

a fake social media profile in order to deceive

consumers into their legitimacy. They then make 

contact, perhaps through a messaging service,

or through by telephone, and they engage 

Australians into a conversation in which

to secure their personal information and 

their financial information. And then once

they obtain that financial information, that's 

where they carry out the financial services.

Alex Brooks 22:19

And when you look at each

link in the chain of deception, nearly all of it 

is enabled by big tech, telcos, banks, regulators,

and by extension, the government. And 

criminals. Well, they call themselves

business people. Remember, are so 

clever, all they need to do is go

to fraud University to learn new ways 

to stay one step ahead of the game.

Speaker 2 22:41

Another fraud expert

has told me that there are fraud universities. 

So the old school fraud defrauding experts are

training up the new generation. Have 

you heard about stuff like that? I

Dan Halpin 22:53

have, and there was a fraud University being

run out of Ukraine before the Ukraine war started, 

that would have closed down at the initial stages

of the Ukraine War, where we saw a lot of the the 

the scammers going to other countries to continue

their scamming. But now that the situation in 

Ukraine has been going on for quite some time,

we know that the scammers are starting to 

come back to Ukraine. We're getting hits on IP

addresses from Ukraine, and we're hearing from our 

informants that they're definitely now operating

back in Kyiv, it's seen as a safe zone, even 

though it's also known as a war war zone. Now,

Alex Brooks 23:30

money has been used as a

weapon of war for centuries. In Israel's recent 

Gaza crisis, banks shut down, ATMs fell empty,

and people couldn't buy food or medicine. Families 

desperate for cash, had to pay ruthless traders

extortionate fees, sometimes even handing over 

their ID as collateral. And back during World

War Two, Hitler planned to destroy Britain by 

dropping counterfeit pound notes from the sky.

He was counting on impoverished wartime Brits 

pocketing the money and creating hyper inflation,

because when you mess with money, 

you mess with more than economics,

inflation or politics or even careers. 

You mess with people's heads. I

Kim Sawyer 24:15

said to Kessada, if we don't, if we're not

prepared to speak about it, particularly people 

in our situation, then everybody will continue

with that sense of shame. And I, you know, and 

I said, and then the scammer wins twice. That's

what it's about. They win. First they take your 

money, and then they take your soul. Exactly.

Alex Brooks 24:38

Staying silent gives scammers and

enablers the power to do it again and again and 

again and again. Next time on daylight robbery,

I explain how my own son's experience 

buying his first home opened my eyes

to the depths of how many legal deceptions 

lurk within Australia's. Financial System,

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