Conman Peter Foster arrested over online betting scam

Police disguised as joggers crash-tackled the notorious conman on a Queensland beach, arresting him for alleged fraud.

Disgraced businessman and conman Peter Foster being arrested by detectives on a Port Douglas beach this morning.

Two policemen disguised as joggers crash-tackled notorious conman Peter Foster on a Far North Queensland beach on Thursday morning, arresting him for alleged fraud and money laundering.

Foster was walking his two dogs on Port Douglas’s Four Mile Beach – close to where he has been staying since late June – when the two officers tackled him to the sand.

Private investigator Ken Gamble was there for the arrest after personally tracking Foster’s movements in the town for the past month and said Foster struggled and “let out a few screams” before expressing concerns for his dogs.

Detectives are going through Foster’s rented two-bedroom villa in Port Douglas and have seized computer equipment.

Foster, dubbed Australia’s greatest conman, allegedly raked in millions of dollars in a gambling scam and was arrested following an investigation by NSW fraud squad detectives.

He had fled to Port Douglas from the Gold Coast after The Australian reported in June that he was secretly running a fraudulent “sports trading” – or betting – scheme, Sport Predictions, using the alias Bill Dawson.

Peter Foster on the Gold Coast in March 2020.

For the past month Mr Gamble, chairman of IFW Global private investigations, was also in Port Douglas with a surveillance team, representing an international client scammed out of $2 million.

The money was allegedly laundered through NSW.

Mr Gamble presented NSW police with evidence of the scam, prompting detectives to launch a strike force that ultimately resulted in Thursday’s arrest.

Foster – known to have been exploring the purchase of a luxury motor boat before the arrest – is understood to be facing around 15 fraud and money laundering charges.

The scheme purported to use experts to place wagers on sporting events – with the motto “We make money out of other people’s mistakes” – but diverted the funds to Foster without the bets being placed, police will allege.

“I received a phone call from a businessman in Asia earlier this year as he’d been dealing with a man who called himself Bill Dawson acting as the CEO of a company called Sport Predictions,” Mr Gamble said in a statement.

“The company purported to be a successful sports trading company offering exclusive membership to selected clients.

“The businessman felt he’d been the victim of an elaborate scam and asked me to investigate in an effort to recover his investment.

“I collected enough evidence to support the belief that Peter Clarence Foster, the notorious Australian criminal, was behind the scam and I immediately referred a complaint to NSW Police, as payments to Sport Predictions were being made in Bitcoin to an exchange in Sydney.

“One of the keys to uncovering the scam was a recorded conversation over an internet conference platform between my client and the man calling himself Bill Dawson. The voice of the man calling himself Bill Dawson is, in my mind, unmistakably Peter Foster.”

The recording of Foster using the Bill Dawson alias while wooing investors was aired in the Audible podcast, The King of Sting.

“We’ve got a mathematician in Melbourne,” Foster, posing as Mr Dawson, says in the recording.

“I always say he wouldn’t know the difference between a cricket ball and a soccer ball if it hit him on the head.

“But he’s a numbers man and he’s a statistics man and he’s basically very good at crunching the numbers.”

The real Bill Dawson is a Queensland horse trainer Foster befriended.

Before fleeing to the state’s far north, Foster, an undischarged bankrupt, had been living in a $2,000-a-week waterfront mansion at Ashmore and driving a $250,000 Bentley convertible with personalised number plates. Sources revealed he also had a Rolls Royce in the garage.

Peter Foster in Fiji before being arrested for another scam.

In the 1980s, Foster famously used his then-girlfriend, pin-up model Samantha Fox, to spruik his scam slimming product Bai Lin Tea.

He later ingratiated himself with Cherie Blair, wife of then-British prime minister Tony Blair, sparking a public scandal when it was revealed he helped Mrs Blair buy two Bristol flats at a discount.

In 2018, Foster was convicted and jailed in NSW for almost 18 months – time already served on remand – for using the pseudonym Mark Hughes in the fraudulent Sports Trading Club (STC) scheme.

STC duped hundreds of Australian and international investors out of $29.6 million. In a creative flourish, it claimed to use savants to predict sporting winners.

NSW Supreme Court judge James Stevenson found in a 2019 civil judgment that STC was a “fraudulent scheme devised, masterminded and controlled by Mr Foster”.

Foster was a “notorious confidence trickster” and investors’ money “was misappropriated at Mr Foster’s instigation and direction”, Justice Stevenson said.