The ‘forever’ friend, the former boss, the ex-husband: the early victims of fraudster Melissa Caddick

“Is there anything else I need to know?” the investment chief asked with cold fury. Before him stood his well-groomed office administrator, Melissa Caddick (then known by her maiden name of Grimley), who had just been confronted with the evidence of her crimes: four cheques on which she’d forged his signature. Caddick shook her head.

It was 1998, and Caddick had landed a job running the Sydney office of a recently opened boutique investment house via a friend she’d worked with at the NRMA. Her boss recalls his assistant as being organised, efficient and reliable. Although there were only the two of them in the office, she dressed immaculately. “Her manicured presentation seemed suited to a job she aspired to, rather than the job she had,” says the former boss.

After Caddick had been there about six months, someone from the firm’s interstate head office queried discrepancies showing up between invoices and payments. When copies of the cheques for the suspicious payments were located at a National Australia Bank branch in Pitt Street in Sydney’s CBD, it became clear that Caddick had been forging her boss’s signature. Shown the cheques, a look of “I’m done” crossed the then 27-year-old’s face. “We can escalate it or you can leave immediately,” he offered.

Caddick made a hasty departure, packing her personal belongings into her designer handbag. “It was a clean exit, no lawyers, no police, no nothing,” her former boss says. She’d stolen a petty amount, less than $2000. She didn’t offer to repay it – and rather than going to the trouble of calling the police, the firm didn’t ask her to. It was just happy to see the back of Melissa Caddick. That, with hindsight, was a crying shame: a criminal record might have forestalled what was to come.

The case of Melissa Caddick and her missing millions has transfixed not just the eastern Sydney suburbs that was her milieu but the wider Australian population, ever since it emerged in November 2020 that the 49-year-old had been running a Ponzi scheme. Between 2012 and 2020, Caddick had convinced more than 60 people to entrust a combined $30 million of their savings to her sham wealth management business, Maliver, none of which she was actually investing on their behalf. Of the $30 million, only about $7 million was returned to clients, leaving as much as $23 million unaccounted for.

While it is not yet clear exactly where all those millions ended up, the old adage, “You have to act rich to be rich”, was one Caddick took to heart. Using the initial proceeds of her crimes, she bought designer clothes, expensive jewellery, European cars and a fancy house, and took her family on luxury holidays several times a year. The ostentatious trappings of wealth cloaked her in a chic veneer of success. She made herself appear more exclusive by telling potential investors that her books were full. She’d call later to say they were in luck – a place had become available.

Clients were sent a seven-page Maliver Financial Services Guide in which Caddick promised to “maximise client outcomes while working within the law”. Instead, she was breaking the law by operating a financial services business without a licence. Under the heading “YOUR ADVIER’S [sic] EXPERIENCE & QUALIFICATIONS”, Caddick also lied about her achievements, including that she had a master’s of business and was a certified member of the Financial Planning Association of Australia.

Once accepted, investors deposited money into Maliver’s Commonwealth Bank account. For each new client, she then created a bogus CommSec share trading account, these fake accounts featuring six-digit numbers where the genuine CommSec account numbers have eight. Not only did she forge her clients’ signatures where required, but when a Justice of the Peace was needed to witness that other signatures were genuine, she also forged the signature of her father-in-law, Rodo Koletti, a JP.

Using a cut-and-pasted CommSec logo, at the end of each month she emailed her investors a report. The shares in which she “invested” her clients’ funds never made a loss. Instead, they showed a dazzling return, sometimes up to 30 per cent a month. Buoyed by such returns, investors would put more money in and, via word of mouth, talk of Caddick’s impressive returns spread.

Most of her victims were her family and friends, many of whom lost their life savings. She cheated her doting parents Barb and Ted Grimley, her older brother Adam, her aunts, uncles and cousins. She ripped off friends she’d had from childhood, along with their families, her personal trainer, her two employees and a group of Perth surgeons, one of whom was a university friend of her brother.

ASIC recorded this single, unsourced complaint about Caddick operating without her own licence, but took no action.

The first thread in the unravelling of Melissa Caddick’s world appeared in November 2019, when the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) received an anonymous tip-off that a Melissa Caddick from Dover Heights in Sydney’s east was operating a financial services business using someone else’s Australian Financial Services Licence.

Caddick knew it was illegal to operate without such a licence, which can attract a $22,000 fine and two years’ jail, and lacked the requisite qualifications to apply for one herself. Her solution had been to ask a former work friend if she could use hers. The friend said no but Caddick had gone ahead and used it anyway. Unaware that this was happening, the friend continued a working arrangement with Caddick in which Caddick referred clients to her friend for insurance broking services. Indeed, Caddick’s own life insurance was done through this person.

“I found out when a potential client of Melissa did some due diligence on the documents they were provided,” the friend says of her discovery that Caddick was using her licence. “ASIC was immediately notified.” When pushed as to the exact date this occurred, she replies: “This is a question for ASIC.” It’s a question the corporate regulator also declines to answer, leaving open the issue of just who tipped them off in November 2019.

Whoever it was, with no mention of fraud or misappropriation, and hundreds of other complaints to assess each month, ASIC recorded this single, unsourced complaint about Caddick operating without her own licence, but took no action.

Seven months later, on June 3, 2020, another complaint arrived at ASIC – this time with more detail. With rising alarm, investigators realised they were dealing with something huge. Concerned that Caddick might get wind that they were on to her, they decided to make a pre-emptive strike. Thus on November 10, 2020, they made an urgent application to the Federal Court to freeze her assets and seize her passport. The application was granted, and the following day the Australian Federal Police raided Caddick’s home in Wallangra Road, Dover Heights. In the 12 months since the initial, unheeded tip-off, Caddick had pocketed $7.8 million.

Caddick at the low-key 50th party of an old friend in a Dolce & Gabbana dress.Credit:

Only a month prior, Caddick had invited herself to the 50th birthday party of one of her oldest friends, Joanna (not her real name). Because of COVID-19, it was a quiet affair, just family and a couple of friends, held at the St George Motor Boat Club at Sans Souci in Sydney’s south. Caddick’s vivid outfit at the low-key event was the subject of much discussion. Joanna and her daughter were shocked when they later discovered the Dolce & Gabbana dress she’d worn had cost $2500. Caddick presented her friend with a bottle of expensive champagne and a Christian Dior scented bathroom deodoriser.

“I remember being really happy that night, thinking how lucky I was to have a friend that I have known forever,” Joanna says. “Looking back, she was ripping off everyone at my party. Every single member of my family plus another couple I had invited.” All up, Joanna’s family was stung for about $10 million.

“Great xx” was the last thing her childhood friend heard from Caddick. At 6am on November 11, the Federal Police had shocked Caddick, her husband and her 14-year-old son when they arrived at their home bearing search warrants. Over the next 13 hours, she watched as an endless parade of her precious clothes, handbags, shoes and jewellery was taken away. Despite the tumultuous events, when Joanna texted her suggesting a lunch date with their mothers, Caddick had texted back the single-word reply and two kisses.

At 5.30 the next morning, Caddick’s son heard the front door close. She’d left in her running gear, her husband told the police, but taken nothing with her. Melissa Caddick was never seen alive again. On February 21 this year, campers at a remote beach on the South Coast of NSW found a running shoe containing human remains which were later identified as those of Caddick. Although the NSW Coroner is yet to make a ruling on her fate, police believe that within hours of the raid, Caddick threw herself off the cliffs only 150 metres from her home.

The cliffs where police believe Caddick took her own life.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Melissa Louise Grimley was born on April 21, 1971. Hers was a comfortable, middle-class family, with her father working in reinsurance and her mother, the driving force in the family, a secretary in a physiotherapy practice. Their house in Lugarno, in Sydney’s south, was surrounded by bushland and backed onto the Georges River.

Caddick was an ordinary girl. At Lugarno Public and then Peakhurst High, there was nothing about her that stood out. Rather than being the numerical whizz she would later claim to be, she undertook the lowest level of maths for her Higher School Certificate. Her ambition to be a ballerina was stymied by her body type, which was short and stocky. She was conscious of fashion labels even back then, according to Joanna. “She always had that desire to be better than she was – even from primary school. She always aspired to be in the coolest group.”

After leaving school, Caddick enrolled in a secretarial and business administration course at Patrick’s College Australia (PCA) in the city. Established in 1923 by the Sisters of Mercy, the college’s original aim, according to its website, was “to help young women gain employment in Sydney’s corporate world by training them to be personal assistants and legal secretaries”.

To this day, PCA aims to help graduates land their perfect job, equipping them with “Modern Business Etiquette and Deportment, Dress Sense, and overall Professional Prestige”. Along with acquiring a dress sense for the life she wanted rather than the life she had, Caddick also seems to have taken the college’s Latin motto to heart: Aut Optimum Aut Nihil – Either the Best or Nothing.

Her first job after secretarial college was in administration at NRMA’s investment division. “She would get very, very cranky if you said, ‘Here’s Melissa, she’s a secretary,’ ” Joanna recalls, noting that her friend tended to give herself a superior title. “She always felt she was so much more than that.”

In her early 20s, Caddick was left emotionally and financially devastated after a romance scam. She was still living at home in Lugarno when she began dating a man she’d met at Friday night drinks in a pub in the city. “Money and various things were going missing from the family home,” recalls Joanna.

The private investigator hired by her parents discovered the man was a con artist who had previously preyed on naïve young women. “When they confronted Melissa with this, she went berserk,” recalls Joanna. “She didn’t believe them and ran away with him.” Her brother Adam rang Joanna begging her “to try to talk some sense into Melissa”. She thought it best to let her friend work things out.

Not long after, Melissa returned home. “He’d maxed out her credit cards,” Joanna says. “He’d got what he wanted and didn’t need her any more.” Caddick was distraught and is believed to have suffered some kind of a breakdown. But while she’d learnt a valuable lesson, it wasn’t the one her friends and family imagined.

A couple of years later, in 1998, she left the boutique investment house mentioned earlier after being caught forging her boss’s signature on cheques. At this point Caddick turned her attention to losing weight and getting fit. Her personal trainer introduced her to another of his clients, a well-regarded financial adviser who was looking to train someone up as an office manager at Wise Financial Services.

Caddick, he recalls, was “bubbly [and] super-efficient”. After a couple of years she did the requisite training to move into financial planning. “She did brilliant work, the clients loved her,” he says. In 2002 Caddick borrowed $750,000 to buy a 25 per cent stake in the business, which was majority owned by global banking giant ING.

Melissa Caddick had found her niche. In 2003 she featured on the cover of trade magazine IFA (Independent Financial Adviser). Wearing a red jacket and her trademark fire-engine red Chanel lipstick, Caddick would have been thrilled with the headline: “A Wise Choice: Australia’s best planning practice.” Another magazine featured Caddick’s eight “golden rules” for finding the right adviser. “Like any profession, financial planning has unscrupulous operators,” she warned in 2004. She cautioned against pyramid schemes and said “no matter how great a deal might look”, it was vital for potential investors to check that their financial adviser was accredited, qualified and ethical.

The next time she featured in IFA, some 17 years later, it was for catastrophic breaches of her own advice. “Melissa Caddick – the sole director of wealth management business Maliver – has been barred from removing assets held in Australia and from leaving the country as ASIC investigates concerns that she was providing financial services without an AFSL [Australian Financial Services Licence], had used another company’s AFSL without authorisation, and had misappropriated investor funds,” the magazine wrote in December 2020.

Back at Wise Financial, it was Caddick’s failure to grasp the importance of compliance and ethics that would prove to be her undoing. Caddick wanted to be able to recommend property and shares in which her clients could invest. Due to strict compliance rules and concern that professional indemnity insurance would be voided if bad advice was given about shares or property plays, financial advisers could only recommend managed investment funds to clients.

Caddick lost the ensuing battle to be allowed to recommend shares to her clients. Leaving Wise in December 2004 amid tears and recriminations, she told friends she was “done” with the industry. Happily signing a five-year non-compete clause, she recouped her original $750,000 investment and left the firm’s St Leonards office in northern Sydney.

One of her subsequent victims, Cheryl Kraft Reid, recalls asking Caddick how a financial planner could possibly afford the extravagant life she led. Caddick spun a lie that she’d departed Wise with $86 million for devising a program to manage superannuation funds and selling it to major financial institutions. Now that she was independently wealthy, she was offering her investment services “to help people”, she told Kraft Reid. Another friend, who knocked back Caddick’s repeated offers to invest with her, was told a different falsehood: that she’d received a massive payout from Wise Financial following a successful sexual harassment suit.

With first husband Tony Caddick, who she dumped and fleeced after cheating on him.Credit:

Before all this, on April 20, 2000, the eve of her 29th birthday, Melissa Grimley married British-born Tony Caddick, a builder’s labourer who’d just turned 28. There was relief among the assembled guests at the Garrison Church in The Rocks when the bride, who blamed her hairdresser for her lateness, finally arrived, wearing a simple, full-length, white silk dress, a tulle veil and a single strand of pearls with matching earrings. The lavish reception was held at Taronga Zoo, the Grimleys showcasing the glorious Sydney Harbour backdrop to the groom’s family, visiting from England.

One friend recalls going to dinner later at the newlyweds’ beautifully renovated Paddington terrace, which had luxury cars in the garage. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘F…ing hell, this just doesn’t add up’ … She was a salaried financial planner and her husband was basically a backpacking Pom,” the friend says. Caddick explained that her brother Adam was helping them out financially. Following his graduation from the University of NSW, Adam worked as a chemist at Esso and later moved to Singapore, where he became a partner specialising in chemicals and energy with global professional services company Accenture.

One thing that stunned Caddick’s circle was her petty larceny. “We’d be at dinner and she would say, ‘That’s a beautiful butter knife,’ and she’d steal it,” says one long-term friend. At a meal at the Caddicks’ house one time, his wife remarked on the unusual salt and pepper shakers. Caddick replied that she’d stolen them from a Paddington restaurant.

Caddick had ambitions for her husband, who’d studied political science in England, and encouraged him to complete a law degree. In April 2006, Tony was admitted as a solicitor. Two months later, their son was born. One of the mothers from her Paddington baby group recalls Caddick being always immaculately groomed while everyone else was in jeans and leisurewear.

“We’d be at dinner and Melissa would say, ‘That’s a beautiful butter knife,’ and steal it.”

While the other new mothers expressed their doubts and complained about lack of sleep, “Melissa never let her guard down”. She always looked dotingly at her son, whom she boasted was “perfect” and a “dream baby” who did “everything by the book”.

Curiously, the woman says she never once talked about her husband. Years later, she was surprised to run into Caddick at a private boys’ school in Sydney’s east. Although their sons had been born only a couple of days apart, Caddick’s son was now a year ahead. Amid the conversation, Caddick confided to this woman that the great job her husband told her he’d secured in London had turned out to be a lie. “It was a complete disaster. I got there, he didn’t have a job, he completely lied to me,” Caddick said.

The fiction that her husband was a controlling narcissist, and cheating on her, and that her brother Adam had to fly to England to rescue her and her son, was a tale she repeated widely. The reality was that Caddick wasn’t working in England, and was bored and lonely. Tony commuted daily to London from Essex, to the city’s north-east, where his family lived.

Telling her husband she needed to brush up on her financial skills, Caddick insisted on attending a conference in Switzerland. Tony was to later tell friends that Caddick was spotted by a mutual friend in a Paris bar canoodling with someone clearly not her husband. It was her Sydney hairdresser, Anthony Koletti. Tony later showed another friend dozens of WhatsApp messages between Koletti and his wife. The messages revealed she’d been paying for her hairdresser to fly around the world for their assignations.

After confronting his wife with the evidence of her infidelity, there was a row and Tony went to stay with his family for a few days. He later told friends that when he returned, not only had Caddick cleaned out their house, she’d also cleaned out their joint bank accounts.

In late January 2012, after 18 months in the UK, Caddick and her son flew back to Sydney without Tony. “When she came back she bad-mouthed Tony to everyone, including her parents,” says one friend. She claimed Tony had been domineering and abusive and that he’d taken her to England to isolate her from her friends and family. Her friend, who was also a victim of Caddick’s investment scam, now sees her claims in a different light.

“I think Melissa deliberately severed our relationship with Tony so nobody would ever find out the truth.”

Tony, by now working as a corporate lawyer, asked to be transferred to Sydney to be closer to his son. He drove a second-hand Hyundai and rented a small apartment in Alexandria. His estranged wife, meanwhile, had taken up residence in the Kensington home the couple had bought for $1.56 million in 2009. She later received the house in the divorce settlement, selling it for $1.67 million in late 2013. She and Koletti then rented a Rose Bay house with five bedrooms and five bathrooms.

“It was a very, very difficult time for Tony,” said another long-time friend of the couple, who recalls that Caddick, who’d always been controlling, changed her phone number and unsuccessfully tried to block Tony’s access to their son.

She would later tell friends she had a list of every country in the world that had non-extradition treaties with Australia and that Tony was never allowed to travel to any of them with their son. Years later, when their son would tell his dad about flying first class or in private jets with his mother, Tony and his friend would puzzle about where the money was coming from. “Koletti’s family must have the money,” Tony would suggest.

“He knew his former wife hadn’t earned it,” says his friend.

“I cancelled my industry super and I gave her everything.”

It wasn’t long after Caddick arrived back from England that she set her sights on her first victim. According to court documents, her friend Joanna, a disability support worker and single mother, was the first to be targeted by Caddick.

Her pitch to Joanna was that since Caddick was already making money buying and selling shares, it was no trouble to do it for both of them. Why didn’t Joanna hand over her superannuation for Caddick to manage? “So I cancelled my industry super and I gave her everything,” Joanna says of her initial investment on October 10, 2012. Caddick didn’t stop at the super. She later convinced Joanna to liquidate her share portfolio and hand the proceeds to Caddick to invest for her, too. She subsequently ensnared the rest of Joanna’s family.

On New Year’s Eve 2013, Caddick’s family and friends were invited to her surprise wedding to Koletti, then 31, whom she’d met at Joh Bailey’s hair salon in Westfield, Bondi Junction. Koletti shared the same April birthday as his wife but was 11 years her junior. Behind his back, her friends referred to Koletti as “The Handbag” or the “Toy Boy”.

His father Rodo would later tell 60 Minutes, “Anthony is a hairdresser. I don’t believe he has the capacity to know what a financial scheme is. I don’t think he could have been in it at all or known what was going on.”

When Koletti took 30 hours to report to police that his wife was missing, Caddick’s cousin offered that, due to the control she exerted in the relationship, Koletti would have been afraid of doing the wrong thing. So he did nothing.

On their wedding night, the guests weren’t to know the proceeds of her crimes were paying for the Moët to flow all night, and for the bride’s three outfit changes, including her white Gucci wedding dress, and for the $2900 weekly rental on the Rose Bay house which had panoramic views across the harbour. The next day Caddick, her son and her new husband jetted off to ski in Aspen for the entire month, with the estimated $80,000 cost of the holiday paid for by her victims.

On a skiing trip with her son and her second husband, Anthony Koletti.

The year 2014 was a good one for Melissa Caddick. Through her brother Adam’s university friend, she managed to tap in to a group of surgeons in Perth. In April, despite her actual net worth being only $600,000, she passed off her investors’ money as her own and was able to obtain a $4 million loan from the National Australia Bank to help purchase the house of her dreams.

Because her company hadn’t been established for long, her brother had to help her get finance and was listed as owning 1 per cent of the house. According to the advertising brochure, the Dover Heights property was a “breathtaking contemporary residence” that enjoyed expansive harbour views and a heated swimming pool. Along with the five bedrooms and a home office, there was a “no-expense-spared kitchen” and “a fabulous roof terrace”.

Caddick’s $6.2 million Dover Heights home.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Only four days after her $6.2 million purchase of the Wallangra Road house, the family jetted off to New York for Easter. They spent the July school holidays in Fiji, then it was back to Aspen for a month over Christmas. On one occasion when the snow was poor at Aspen, the avid skier spent $34,000 decamping the family to Whistler in Canada. It was five stars all the way and a pattern that was to be repeated year in, year out.

Along with the extravagant holidays, which sometimes involved private jets and limousines, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on European labels: Chanel, Dior, Valentino and Louis Vuitton. Caddick spent $54,000 – more than the median Australian salary – at just one Double Bay shoe shop. More than $200,000 was spent on jewellery and in 2016 she used investors’ funds to buy Koletti a bright blue $390,000 Audi. The car’s number plates, 2 PAWS, was a riff on his company, Paws Off Productions. Unfortunately, the “pause” button remained firmly depressed on his aspiring musical ambitions. Breeding prawns in his home aquarium also amounted to naught.

The $390,000 Audi Caddick bought Koletti.Credit: @supacarxposed/Instagram

After his wife vanished, Koletti revealed that he had only $1.95 in his bank account. He told the Federal Court that he’d been employed part-time as a hairdresser until the COVID lockdown in late March, 2020. He said his wife, “who was the primary breadwinner in our family”, was worried about the “health risk to the family” so she wanted him to “remain at home and to attend to household duties”. In his December 2020 affidavit filed in court, he stated: “I currently do not earn an income.”

Caddick was constantly on the hunt for fresh prey. One victim, Faye Reid, recalls that whenever she and her wife Cheryl met Caddick at her home to go over their finances, Caddick repeatedly licked her lips. “It was slow and constant. She would talk a little bit and then lick her lips, talk a little bit and then lick her lips … I’m going, ‘Oh god, what’s wrong with this woman?’ ”

Sydney forensic psychiatrist Olav Nielssen has dealt with many fraudsters who tell him they know “very well that the end will come”, but they keep going because it’s addictive and they can’t stop. Caddick, he suggests, had a shopping addiction, which is known as compulsive buying disorder (CBD). Research suggests CBD mainly affects women, with the age of onset in the early 20s, which corresponds with leaving home and gaining financial independence.

In her book, I Shop Therefore I Am, April Lane Benson writes that perfectionism, dishonesty, insecurity and the need to gain control have been linked to the disorder. CBD sufferers report having negative emotions such as depression, anxiety and low self-esteem, with shopping providing feelings of relief or euphoria. CBD sufferers often have other obsessive-compulsive disorders such as skin picking or hair pulling.

Cheryl Kraft Reid (at rear) and her partner Faye Reid were both ripped off by Melissa Caddick.Credit: Ben Rushton

Caddick had a couple of close calls. In 2016, one of the Perth surgeons was going through a bitter divorce and asked Caddick about making alternative arrangements for the trustee of his self-managed super fund. Perhaps fearing that the surgeon’s ex-wife might hire a forensic accountant, Caddick abruptly “liquidated all his assets” without consulting him and returned his funds.

In September 2019 another Perth surgeon and his wife were about to invest with Caddick. When his wife starting raising concerns about Caddick’s trust fund details and how the CommSec account would be run, her husband received a call from Caddick saying she was putting his possible investment on hold as her husband’s cousin had died and she needed to attend his funeral. That was the last time the surgeon spoke to her. Meanwhile, his wife had contacted the Sydney woman whose financial services licence Caddick had been using without permission. It was not long after this that ASIC received the anonymous complaint.

One of the fake statements provided to Cheryl Kraft-Reid and her partner Faye Reid by Caddick.Credit: Ben Rushton

January 2020 was much like any other for Caddick. The family went to Aspen, where their three-bedroom apartment at North of Nell – rented, not owned as Caddick had told people – looked straight onto the mountain.

When a friend organised a lunch to introduce her to another owner in the building, Caddick begged off at the last minute, saying she’d been hit by a snowboarder. On this same trip, Caddick met a woman from Woollahra in Sydney who expressed interest in investing. Caddick initially knocked her back, telling her the books were full. Once back in Sydney, however, a spot was found. The woman’s first investment of $1 million had made such a handsome return that by April she’d invested a total of $2.5 million.

In August 2020, while in a dentist’s waiting room, this investor struck up a conversation with a fellow patient, also from Sydney’s east. When the patient told her she was a financial adviser, the investor mentioned her joy at having found Melissa Caddick. The other patient was horrified and confided that Caddick had been fraudulently using her licence – and that ASIC had been notified.

That same day, the investor rang Caddick wanting her money back, saying it was because she’d suddenly found a house to buy. At 6.22am the following day, Caddick emailed her telling her she would make more money investing in shares with Caddick than in property. By mid-morning, Caddick had changed tack. She’d be happy to speak to the investor’s brother or could she refer one or two people to her business – “now that you know what we do”. The investor, who ignored her entreaties, was one of the lucky ones. She not only received her $2.5 million back but also her “fake” returns of $300,000.

One of Caddick’s feet was found inside a shoe on Bournda Beach on the NSW South Coast in February. Credit:

Investors weren’t the only ones sucked in by Caddick. In late 2019, her brother Adam travelled to Australia from Singapore for a hip replacement. Due to COVID-19, he was stuck in Sydney when his family’s close-knit world was upended. At first, the Grimleys refused to accept that their loved one had done anything wrong. But as the days stretched on and the pilfered amounts continued to rise, Adam struggled to deal with not just the public scandal but also the devastating private betrayal.

“It really does hurt,” says Joanna. “If she had had a brain snap” and stolen the money, “I could cope with that better than knowing the number of times she looked me in the eye as I thanked her for making such a big difference to my life and to my children.” Caddick would shrug off the gratitude saying, “That’s just what I do.”

But Joanna and her family are determined that Caddick’s monstrous deception will not tear them apart. “Nothing matters more than family. We are determined she won’t ever take that.”

Unfortunately, none of this is new to Sydney forensic psychiatrist Julian Parmegiani. “Fraudsters see themselves as the predator, the others being the prey,” he says. “The mindset of a lot of fraudsters is that if you are stupid enough to fall for my game, my trick, then you deserve what you get.” The longer a fraudster gets away with it, he says, “the more invincible they feel”.

When the day of reckoning came for Caddick, Parmegiani speculates that she knew she was facing a lengthy period in jail. “She had chosen a different lifestyle and it was either that or nothing.”

If you or anyone you know needs support call Lifeline 131 114.

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