NSW Crime Commission reveals crime networks advertise on SEEK, Airtasker
Organised crime groups are setting up fake companies and advertising for “drivers” on SEEK and Airtasker, the powerful NSW Crime Commission has revealed.
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Organised crime groups are setting up fake trucking companies and advertising for “drivers” on SEEK and Airtasker to keep their drug dealing at arms length, the powerful NSW Crime Commission has revealed.
As the crime networks get more sophisticated, their wealth has gone through the roof with the commission seizing $13.38 million from one crook alone and almost $8 million from another.
“Sydney remains the organised crime hub of Australia,” Commissioner Michael Barnes said in his annual report.
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The peak crime-fighting body has seized a record $50,825,309 in proceeds of crime over the past year, the highest in the history of the commission and over $20 million more than the average of the previous five years despite the pandemic.
The commission made 175 joint arrests, up from 118 the previous year, and laid 833 charges, up from 525.
The sham delivery and courier companies have no truck fleets – or in the case of one investigation just one truck – and exist only through phone numbers, email addresses or WhatsApp and Wikr with recruits encouraged to keep electronic records to make it look real in the event of an arrest.
“Drivers and associated handlers of the prohibited drugs when arrested allege that they were ‘recruited’ by answering internet based advertisements such as on SEEK jobs online or Airtasker,” the commission’s report, tabled in NSW Parliament on Wednesday, states.
“This sort of activity demonstrates increased sophistication by OCGs not only in the importation and distribution of prohibited drugs but also in their attempts to evade detection and prosecution.”
The gangs are also analysing the briefs of evidence in cases with similar offences in order to identify law enforcement methodologies and stay one step ahead.
Some exiled bikie kingpins have renounced their Australian citizenship and have bought citizenships and passports to hamper attempts at extradition should they get arrested and investigations into their overseas locations, the report states.
It is understood that one of those is ex-Comanchero Marco Coffen who paid US$130,000 for citizenship of the Pacific tax haven of Vanuatu.
Coffen, who lives in Dubai, is a member of the “Aussie Cartel”, an offshore group linked to bikie gangs including the Hells Angels, Lone Wolf and Comanchero which the crime commission said controlled the majority of the larger drug shipments targeting Australia.
However the Cartel – which includes fellow bikie boss Mark Buddle – and other organised crime networks have begin to target Europe as an easier market with the result that cocaine prices in Australia have doubled from prepandemic prices, according to the crime commission.
Ex-Comanchero leader Buddle, who has also made Dubai his home but is currently in Lebanon, established his own ‘Commission’ to control the importation and price of drugs into Australia by imposing a tax on them but the crime commission said that was unlikely to work.
“It is unlikely that the larger … cartels would be influenced by attempts to regulate their conduct, and any attempt by the ‘Commission’ to do so, including by violence, would likely result is significant reprisals in Australia and overseas,” the report states.
It reveals that a joint investigation by the NSW Crime Commission, NSW Police and the US Drug Enforcement Agency uncovered a conspiracy to import three tonnes of cocaine into NSW by a European syndicate in direct competition with the Commission “demonstrating that competition in the market continues”.
Commissioner Barnes said the crooks were getting smarter.
“Serious and organised crime continues to proliferate and to become increasingly complex – or to put it another way, the crooks are getting greedier and smarter,” he said on Wednesday.
“We know that next year we will have to do even better if we are to keep up.
“Law enforcement agencies must co-operate – we cant afford to get in each other’s way. We each have areas of speciality that can contribute to a net gain in the war against serious and organised crime if deployed intelligently.”
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