Bank robbers no longer carry sawn off shotguns or break open safes. Today's bank robbers don't even leave home to do their dirty work, and it's you who is the target, not the bank

This has become the most profitable crime on Earth.

This is Daylight Robbery. I'm your host. Alex Brooks, in the 1970s and 80s, Australia had a violent, armed bank robbery crisis. Today there's a digital bank robbery crisis. The weapons of choice are stolen, emails, fake documents and exploited trust. The getaway car is almost always a mule bank account, a shady kind of account, sometimes set up with stolen ID. Make no mistake, Australia's digital bank robberies are violent. They steal first home deposits, savings and entire superannuation and retirement dreams. Our laws haven't kept up with exponentially fast changing cybercrime, and it's financially ruining Australians. There's no alarms, no sirens, and very little chance of getting your money back.

Imagine being one of five sisters with the burden of legal and financial affairs for your elderly mother falls to you. Your mother has suffered devastating strokes, and you have to sell the cherished oceanfront family home to fund her nursing care. $2 million from the property sale vanishes in a digital bank robbery. The bank recovers $400,000 but $1.6 million is gone forever. Now, did the bank fail by not stopping that first transfer? Or were you to blame for being hoodwinked by a professional scammer? Digital bank robbery is about more than money. Who exactly should pay the price. Canberra woman Harriet Spring lost that eye watering $2 million transferring money from a small customer-owned bank called Teachers mutual.

Harriet:

The emotional toll that it's taken has been so extreme, I honestly thought I wouldn't get through it. I was uncontrollably crying for the first week I would say I immediately sought counselling, on antidepressants, telling my sisters, ringing them up and telling them some of the hardest conversations I've ever had. I just was such a mess. I felt like such a failure.

Harriet had been groomed for months by a British man phoning her from ING to help her set up a managed investment, also known as a term deposit.

Harriet:

We're not kind of wealthy gazillionaires. This was just money that was an absolute bonus, but would have really helped with my sisters and particularly a few of them, they're just beyond devastated. It's changed the path of their lives.

Harriet has no idea how she fell into the scammers clutches. It may have been an email breach of the real estate details, or a fake Facebook ad, or even a website pretending to be ING. Police took more than a week to even take a report from Harriet

Harriet:

I asked the police when they first turned up, would you have taken seven days to turn up? Had I gone to the Dixon branch of the Commonwealth Bank and robbed the bank? The robbery was so well executed that Harriet even logged into a fake bank website to check her money had gone through.

A day later, I get an electronic receipt saying, yes, the money has landed in the account. And here's the receipt. And I said, How do I access how to see that? And they sent me an email link of how to access to see my account. I could go in and see it was like $1.6m there it is, sitting there all ING branded

Harriet believed she was transferring money to an account in her own name, but banks don't have to match names and account numbers.

Ken:

One of the biggest laws in the banking system in Australia, which has allowed term deposits to flourish, was the fact that you didn't have to have the name right, the payee name correct. That's been a big issue. The term deposit gangs overseas have capitalised on that, because they were able to roll over the bank account into a mule's name, but actually put your name in as the beneficiary. So having the incorrect name was a big flaw in the banking system that allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to go into accounts that shouldn't the money shouldn't have gone into those accounts, and the banks should have flagged it.

That's Ken Gamble, a financial crime investigator who takes down scam gangs and recovers money, Ken told us in episode one that a different scam from Harriet's raised $5 million into an Australian bank account with links to Hezbollah and Hamas. Both are terrorist organisations that banks are not supposed to send money to. Now, one would ask, How the hell could this be this Lebanese person be involved in moving money for a big crime syndicate who are making millions of dollars a day, raising money for what purpose?

criminals use scams and fraud to fund all sorts of crime, drugs, human trafficking, child exploitation. Ken and investigator Dan Halpin say it's British, Russian, Chinese and Israeli organized crime behind the most harmful digital bank robberies. The gangs use a network of tech savvy mules on the ground in Australia to create or trade those all important mule accounts, the shady bank accounts we talked about in episode one. Sometimes mule accounts are set up with stolen ID, and sometimes a willing stooge offers up their account to take a cut of the money. And apparently this Lebanese politician is supposed to be an innocent party, because I've interviewed him, and I have a recorded interview with him, and he's now told me that his friend, a childhood friend, is the one that asked to use his account, and the childhood friend happens to run a big crypto currency exchange registered in Estonia and Lithuania, right? So the money has gone back to organized crime and potentially the terrorism. Mule bank accounts and cryptocurrency are vital cogs in the machine of industrialized scamming and digital bank robbery. SIREN SOUND industrial scale, digital bank robbery could be stopped tomorrow, if police, banks and governments could crack this mule account problem.

How do you prevent a person that goes to a bank that seemingly opens up an account under legitimate purposes? This is where it gets complex. It's sophisticated. It's not a straightforward situation where a criminal opens up an account just to launder money. Ken

says, overseas crime gangs brazenly target Australians on holiday in Bali to open mule accounts for them.

A whole lot of people that have been to Bali have been going home and suddenly using their accounts to launder money for a very big boiler room fraud syndicate

In countries like Singapore, the government is recommending mandatory jail for six months for money mules. Mule accounts are used to launder the proceeds of all types of crime. In the old days, criminals washed their dirty money through Swiss bank accounts and cash intensive businesses like bars and casinos, you've seen those mob movies, right? But in today's cashless world, money laundering relies on cryptocurrency and mule bank accounts. All the money that banks can't find in their trace and recover from digital bank robberies, like the $1.6 million from Harriet's mother's property, becomes clean money for crime gangs to buy assets with. Criminals store their ill-gotten gains in cryptocurrency and buy real estate, gold, jewellery, art and other high value items with money washed by mule accounts.

For victims knowing their stolen money funds terrible things adds to the trauma. We hear

that austrac and the Attorney General's department are concerned about laundered money coming into Australia. What about what's going out? And we're just told, once it's gone out, that's it. You can't trace

it. Industrialized scamming spiked during COVID lockdowns in 2020, nearly five years ago, yet there's been little increase in state police funding or training to deal with these crimes. Dan Halpin, who you also met in Episode One, says state police aren't referring these crimes to the Australian Federal Police or to Interpol. What we need is a bottom up approach to solving scams, not a top down approach. So there's no use funding federal government agencies to make a difference if victims aren't getting the support or investigation at the the base level, which is state police. We're even hearing from victims. When they walk into the police station to report their case, police will say, Okay, well, this is a situation or or a case that's outside of our jurisdiction. The offenders are overseas, and in some, some cases, we've heard the police say we won't even take a report from you.

New South Wales police statistics show the solve rate for scam obtaining funds crimes has halved since 2020.

Dan:

We've got to remember that this is an indictable offence, fraud, massive amounts of money, up to millions of dollars of money from victims, and Traditionally, an indictable offence. Would you? First thing you would do would be sit down with the local police officer and record a statement. They don't even do that anymore. They just put it in a database, send it off, and it goes untouched.

Harriet's case was different. Her bravery in going on TV about the worst experience of her life meant Victorian detective senior constable James Delianus, connected Harriet's case to Operation Sabine. That detective has now arrested seven people in connection with Harriet's crime. But that doesn't mean Harriet will get any money back. In fact, the detective expressly told Harriet police cannot disclose information that might help her recover money due to sub judice contempt. The law, it seems, is an ass. Harriet says the betrayal and financial devastation of digital bank robbery isn't the cruelest part, it's the protection the law gives to criminals. So all

of this data and information that could help people either accept that what's happened, like everything was done by the books, or actually know there was some really poor behaviour and you were failed by your banks, so that you can have recourse against your banks, it's all kept against you. So not only are you robbed, you're told you have no rights, you'll have no chance, but all the information is kept in a vault, not for you to

see. Harriet's mother's bank Teachers Mutual doesn't have the same large fraud teams of the big four banks.

Harriet:

I was given the name of the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and she gave me her personal mobile number, but I was pretty appalled. This is the woman who at Teachers Mutual is in charge of security. That's that's her job as COO. And she said, Oh, I had to google ING scams. Who knew it was a thing? And I'm like, oh, that's reassuring. That's really reassuring.

And after Harriet went on TV, Queenslander Scott Borg reached out to say he had warned ING about Harriet's scam at least nine months before hers happened. And ING even published a scam warning in June 2023 But Harriet and Teachers Mutual never saw it.

There's a point of law called the Ryan duty, which was a 1977 case of Ryan against the Bank of New South Wales. And in that it says, And I'll paraphrase it says something like, If a banker is aware of information that the customer is not aware of, and had the customer had that information, they would not be authorizing the transfer, then the banker has a duty of care to stop the transfer. Ken and Dan agree that banks hide behind privacy protections and sometimes prevent investigators arresting criminals and recovering funds.

Ken:

but the banks still won't give us any information because of bank secrecy and bank privacy, and yet they're protecting these criminals and the accounts and the information and that all the data that's required by people like us, and they say, Oh no, you gotta go to court. So they force the victim into paying $20,000 in legal fees just to go to court.

Dan: And that's where it comes, comes back to the fact that our system is broken because it just goes round in a circle, finger pointing. The government is now passing the buck to the private industry. The banks, although, yes, the banks need to take responsibility and protect their victims or sorry their customers, that should not be the sole focus. At the moment, the government should be creating legislation that says, if the police don't actively and genuinely investigate a case as far as they possibly can, then the government is liable, and the government then needs to refund the victims.

Harriet is committed to keep telling her story in the hope the system will change.

Harriet: I had PC plod turn up at my door seven days later. No fraud training, no scam training, nothing. Just took my case, took her three months in between night shifts to even write up my case. She could see the account of the mule. I don't know how police can do it, but that she could see into the mule account, and she said, it's obvious there's been a lot of money laundering here. There's a lot of money going in and a lot of money washing out.

The complexity of money moving through mule accounts in Australian banks is mind boggling. Most of us think banks have whiz bang fraud detection systems, but it doesn't seem anywhere near as efficient as you might hope. Harriet: They traced it back to Westpac and notified Westpac of their suspicions that it was a fraudulent money and money laundering. Westpac knew that on the seventh of February, according to Teachers Mutual, they didn't tell Teachers Mutual, it was a fraud until 10 o'clock in the morning on the 14th of February.

So no one can find that lost $1.6 million it's all a mystery, which is why banks have to blame the victim for incurring their own loss. Banks greatest legal obligation is protecting shareholder returns, and we do need banks to be profitable. Plenty of us own bank shares through our superannuation, and we do want banks to invest more to upgrade security. Harriet: I

think it's a very good tactic by the government and the banks to say to everyone, let's just quash all your hopes, any of your expectations, and let's just sort of, you know, maybe stop you at the gate there and just say, don't even bother, you know, just just walk away and be ashamed and just give up, because there's nothing you can do. We've got this all worked out to work against you.

Dan Halpin takes a more controversial view

Dan: In Australia, are we looking at a situation where the government and their response on the coalface, such as local policing, it is so poor, should the government also be liable for negligence?

It's clear that criminals are winning the cybercrime war. Despite Harriet's willingness to share her story she never did tell her sick and dying mum that her money had been stolen. Sadly, Harriet's mum has now passed.

Harriet:

My mother got an Order of Australia medal for services to community, for working for 70 years for charities and giving up her time from the Girl Guides to the Red Cross to Smith Family to Stuart House to setting up Embroiderers' Guild for the elderly community, like she was an amazing woman, this isn't the legacy she deserves.

Next time on Daylight Robbery, we meet the widow who managed to get back every cent of her dead husband's $760,000 life insurance payout. No police, no lawyers, SUBSCRIBE and FOLLOW to find out how she did it.