They looked like any other couple at the auction. But the Russians had a secret.
Calm behind their dark sunglasses, they pushed the price higher and higher. The waterfront home they were bidding on that day was just one property in a sprawling multimillion-dollar portfolio the pair had quietly snapped up since arriving in Australia. And all of it was paid for with laundered cash, police allege – a money trail international investigators have since linked to bank embezzlement and waste dumping scandals back home in Russia.
One of the luxury Gold Coast properties bought by the Russian couple, who were charged with money laundering offences in 2024.Credit: Domain
Real estate agents who worked with the Russian couple, helping them buy and then rent out the glitzy homes for thousands of dollars a week, told this masthead nothing seemed amiss. Buyers ringing in bids from unknown locations might raise alarm bells, even after the strange days of the pandemic normalised remote auctions, but this couple was there willing to sign a contract. “We don’t have to ask any other questions,” one realtor said.
Just two years later, in 2024, the couple were rounded up in police raids, charged with laundering money through Queensland real estate and ATMs across Victoria and NSW. They have not been convicted and are on bail fighting the charges in Queensland courts.
Australia has fallen behind Russia and the rest of the developed world in efforts to keep money launderers out of real estate, according to new research.
While some reforms are due to take effect from mid-next year, experts say the dirty money has already pushed up house prices as criminals swoop on mansions and luxury apartments, and more needs to be done to catch them.
Luxury properties bought by the Russian couple were seized by police as they arrested the pair on money laundering charges. Credit: Domain
The major agencies told a Senate inquiry in 2021 that tens of billions of dollars were laundered through Australian property each year, and regulatory sources, not authorised to speak publicly about more recent data, said the scale of the problem had not improved as the country grapples with a housing crisis.
Criminal syndicates from Russia to China are hiding proceeds of crimes offshore in Australia, even with recent changes requiring more foreign asset disclosures. And home-grown crooks, such as the drug trafficking empire of Melbourne gangland boss George Marrogi, have also turned to real estate – including prime land for development – as they look to “wash” dirty cash by moving it through the financial system until it cannot be traced to crime.
Australia sits at the very bottom of a new ranking by Transparency International and the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, which for the first time examined both anti-money laundering regulations and the data collected on property buyers in some of the biggest economies in the world.
Russia (where, like Australia, you can buy property with bundles of physical cash) ranked 15th out of the 24 countries assessed, also ahead of the United States. South Africa came in first place, after recent reforms.
No country got perfect marks, with much of the world’s real estate still “shockingly exposed” to criminal syndicates, the report found.
Transparency International’s chief in Australia, Clancy Moore, said Australia’s comparatively weak laws and booming property market make it a “magnet for organised crime gangs to wash their dirty money”, even more desirable than global hotspots like the UK’s “Londongrad”.
That was pushing up housing prices locally, Moore said, “shutting out ordinary Australians from the dream of owning a home”.
Australia is one of just a handful of countries (alongside Haiti and Madagascar) where “gatekeeper” professions such as real estate agents, lawyers and accountants are still exempt from important anti-money laundering laws. Unlike banks and casinos, they don’t have to do due diligence checks on customers or report suspicious transactions.
That’s about to change here, nearly two decades after Australia first promised to close the loophole. The Albanese government’s crackdown on real estate (and other gatekeeper industries) comes into force from July 2026, despite opposition from the Coalition. But Moore warns that still leaves a “long window for exploitation”.
Unlike banks and casinos, real estate agents don’t have to do due diligence checks on customers or report suspicious transactions.Credit: Monique Westermann
Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus told this masthead the reforms were long overdue. “Hardworking Australians should not have to compete in the housing market against criminals with their dirty cash,” he said.
The real estate lobby argues it is impossible to estimate how far that tide of illicit money pushes up house prices. But economists and realtors report that sales through companies or buyers’ advocates hiding criminal buyers are probably having an impact on local prices, as research tracking the same problem in Europe and Canada has found.
AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said he was surprised more hadn’t already been done to address the impact of organised crime on Australian house prices.
At the higher end of the market, where fewer homes are for sale (and wealthy clients often value discretion), bids above market value can have bigger ripple effects, pulling up entire streets.
“While most of the strength in the market comes down to ordinary Australians, to the extent nefarious activity is pushing it up, that should be investigated,” Oliver said.
The Australian Federal Police calls money laundering the lifeblood of the underworld, funding more violent crimes and lavish lifestyles.
The major syndicates favour real estate as their main avenue of cleaning cash, according to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, and recent research found “laundering may artificially increase prices to the point where ordinary buyers cannot compete”.
Property accounts for more than two-thirds of the assets the AFP seize from organised crime each year (totalling more than $354 million over the past two financial years, police say).
Australia’s anti-money laundering agency, AUSTRAC, recently analysed six months’ worth of real estate transactions bought via cryptocurrency conversion and discovered numerous links to dark web accounts, gambling and even known online scammers. Some mysterious buyers were transferring up to $100 million to buy large portfolios of property.
John Moss, the agency’s head of intelligence, told this masthead that organised crime figures were smart enough to enlist professional facilitators and middlemen to help them park their money in real estate, whether properties to rent out or parcels of land for development.
In one case, a group of fraudsters exploiting the NDIS invested their haul in property. When they realised the game was up and investigators were closing in, they simply sold those properties and bought more overseas.
“This is a robust and secure asset for a criminal, even when they’re in trouble,” Moss said.
The Albanese government’s expanded laws come with $160 million to help real estate agents, lawyers and other professions adjust to new requirements such as client checks, which may have to be outsourced.
Industry groups say the cost of regulatory burden could shut down small firms. But while law enforcement agencies welcome the change, senior sources say the new laws don’t go far enough.
One of the men arrested at a multimillion-dollar home as part of the Sydney money laundering syndicate raid.Credit: AFP
Neither of the two main parties has adopted all the recommendations of a 2021 Senate inquiry, which heard tales of home buyers competing at auctions against organised crime gangs. Some real estate agents still use armoured cars to deposit cash from buyers into the bank, authorities and realtors said.
In Melbourne and Sydney, there have been cases of convicted money launderers busted working at real estate agencies, or realtors charged with handling the proceeds of crime (and drug trafficking). But former detective Nick McTaggart, who previously co-ordinated Australia’s anti-money laundering investigations, said most dirty cash slips the net, given the difficulty of prosecuting such cases.
He offers an example: a gang buys a block of units outright with drug money, redevelops the site (“taking advantage of those government fast track [incentives] for new apartments”) and brings in people to buy those homes off the plan. “But these are people who can’t get loans from a bank, so it’s the gang who loans them the cash for a deposit to then get a mortgage,” McTaggart said. “When cops come in to seize it all, it doesn’t look like proceeds of crime because real banks have put mortgages over the site. The gang sell, those loans are repaid, and they’ve washed $300 million, clean as a whistle. ”
He argues police need more resources to target the syndicates who now specialise in laundering cash for other gangs, as well as a dedicated financial crime police force, akin to the Secret Service in the US (which was created to guard the Treasury and now also the president).
Laundering syndicates often use the cash they clean for other gangs as temporary capital to make their own fortunes on markets or invest their commissions in real estate.
In 2023, the AFP dismantled a $10 billion Chinese-Australian laundering operation linked to Korean and Middle Eastern gangs that had built up a blue-chip property portfolio of Sydney mansions, harbourside city towers and acres of prime development land worth $157 million.
In that case, properties could be tracked back to the same business and players.
But often, Moss said, true ownership is obscured behind trusts, shell companies and dummy directors, with assets often held under the names of relatives or money mules. “It’s especially hard to confiscate assets or potential proceeds of crime held in a company name because shareholders are generally protected from criminal liability,” Moss said.
Australia has yet to create a beneficial ownership register forcing disclosure of where proceeds really flow, as other countries (including known tax haven the Cayman Islands) have of late, though the Albanese government says such work is in train.
Without a register, Moore said, “Russian oligarchs and crooks [have been free] to use corporate structures akin to babushka dolls to hide their identities and the source of their illicit funds”.
This year, the Albanese government announced it would ban foreign nationals from buying existing homes in Australia for the next two years (though not new developments), matching a Coalition policy. Oversight of foreigners buying property, such as the Russian couple charged in 2024, were already tightened in 2023, after the pair’s spending spree on Gold Coast real estate came to an end.
The Coalition was contacted for comment.
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