Aussies top target of Philippines-based investment scams

Australians have become the ‘No 1 target’ of investment scams run by a web of foreign nationals operating from The Philippines.

A boiler room depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.

Australians have become the “No 1 target” of investment scams run by a web of foreign nationals operating from The Philippines, a private investigator has warned.

IFW Global executive chairman Ken Gamble, who has exposed a series of “boiler room” schemes in Australia and abroad, said The Philippines was the new “scam capital of the world”. He is seeking a meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte to hand over dossiers on more than 150 Americans, Canadians, Britons and Australians using the country as a base for fraudulent share investment schemes that begin with cold calls.

Fraud figures cited by Australian authorities underestimated the scale of the problem because of a reluctance of victims to report ­financial crimes, he said.

“Thousands of Australians are being called and a lot of them are converted into clients,” Mr Gamble said. “There would be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of unreported fraud.”

Mr Gamble is investigating Manila scams on behalf of defrauded Australians who in some instances have lost their life savings. The scams typically involve companies purporting to be reputable financial advisory firms with exclusive access to discounted wholesale shares. The firms are legitimate, but the shares are not.

“(In one case) they were targeting just Aussies and they completely Australianised the scam, which is the first time I’ve ever seen this,” he said.

“Your average, honest everyday Aussie is falling for it. They’re getting these high-pressure cold calls that say, ‘You can invest your money. This is much better interest than the banks’.

“They’re just selling the dream, basically. They’re slowly sucking dry all these families that are ­retired, have got their super.”

Australians reported losing $340 million to scams in 2017, a 13 per cent increase on the ­previous year, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s latest Targeting Scams report says. More than 200,000 scams were reported to the ACCC and other government agencies that year.

Mr Gamble previously pursued Gold Coast conman Peter Foster over a multi-million-dollar sports betting scam. His firm has an ­office in Manila and he was involved in police raids last year on three separate boiler-room operations run by foreign nationals.

“They’re all interconnected, they’re all assisting each other with leads,” he said. “It’s a big family. They all know each other, they socialise together, they drink together. They all help each other, they all warn each other.”

Philippines scammers had “come to the realisation that Aussie cops are never going to go after them”, Mr Gamble said.

“Australia is the No 1 target country. They’ve got call centres ringing people all over Australia on a daily basis.”

Investors are passed through a chain of more senior members of the syndicate. “After they’ve lost everything, the recovery room scammers start. They’ll call up and say the company has been shut down, there’s been a tax audit or in some cases they purport to be investigating the fraud.

“They say, ‘We’ve got a class action against this firm, your name is on it and you’ve got to pay so much money to join’.”