Man’s savings wiped in $80m global investment scam
An Aussie dad was devastated when he lost $120,000 but he’s now on a crusade to uncover other victims.
A Melbourne man had his wedding savings wiped out by a painful $120,000 loss.
Jason Loyola was a victim of a long running scam that corporate cop ASIC was warned about in 2020. The next year Mr Loyola was targeted, and later found other victims worldwide, including dozens of Australians.
The IT director was looking for an investment opportunity to help fund his dream wedding when he came across a financial consultancy service.
To do his due diligence he checked the business’s ABN, Australian Financial Services Licence and the Moneysmart website, which had no warnings. He started investing in small amounts, eventually pouring in $60,000 in five separate transactions over six months in 2021.
“It wasn’t just like a one-time thing and then the scammers took my money. It was more they built a relationship,” he told news.com.au.
A good-natured English man would check in with Mr Loyola, noting good returns and asking about his fiance. In return, the man would talk about his young kids.
Mr Loyola remembers being “really excited” to cash out the investment returns to pay for his wedding but when he made a withdrawal request he was met with silence.
Worst nightmare comes true
Then he married the love of his life and went on his honeymoon, but when Loyola returned home he was desperately trying to contact the company.
The website for the company, DHP Finance Consultants had disappeared.
He linked the company to a Queensland based accountancy firm and reached out to them about getting back his $60,000.
His “heart sank” when he was told the ABN did belong to the company but it traded under a different name, and there was no official website for the holding entity. The accounting firm told him it had already informed ASIC that someone was cloning or mimicking them.
Emails seen by news.com.au from the company to Mr Loyola said persons not associated with it “have fraudulently used its company name and ABN when dealing with consumers on its website. We made ASIC aware of this sometime ago”. The company declined to comment when contacted by news.com.au.
“My heart sank and it all kind of made sense. It all kind of rushed through me and I then started the whole journey for the last four years now, trying to get my money back (and) to find others like me,” he added.
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Global scam syndicate uncovered
Since then Mr Loyola has been a part of a group of victims who have connected via a group called Investment Scam Asia.
They have uncovered 150 others who have been defrauded globally with a loss of $80 million from the same syndicate, with about $25 million taken from 50 Australians, he claimed.
“The syndicate has been running for over 10 years first terrorising Europe,” he said.
“This syndicate was able to open bank accounts in Australian and overseas without obstacles … The syndicate maintained websites pretending to be reputable Australian and foreign companies and using their ABN, ACN or any other business registration number.”
Victims estimate the syndicate has stolen at least $10 billion over the last decade.
But it didn’t stop there for the 37-year-old. He discovered he had been scammed a second time when he thought he was diversifying his portfolio, losing another $60,000 and later discovering both companies he had used to make investments were linked.
Police get involved
There was a “little bit of hope” when Queensland police investigated the local Heritage account, he said, with Mr Loyola thinking the bank might be held accountable for receiving stolen funds.
However his report was fruitless – in a letter seen by news.com.au from police, Mr Loyola was told the person who owned the account was also a victim of the scam. The account holder had been “manipulated into creating the account for legitimate business dealings” and lost money too.
“The unknown offenders have also been reported as resorting to threats and intimidation to retain their status as legitimate investment firm,” the letter said.
It added the organisation had been involved in similar reports of using cloned investment websites, call centre operators and shell addresses for posted mail, while funds were transferred into cryptocurrency and offshore making them untraceable by police.
“Having observed reports from other informants, conducted interviews, obtain(ed) banking records and spoken with people caught up in these scams, this set-up appears sophisticated and is based offshore,” the police letter stated.
A Heritage Bank spokesperson said they couldn’t discuss individual customers due to privacy but protecting people from scams and fraud was a top priority.
Now a crusader, Mr Loyola works with other scam victims as part of Investment Scam Asia. The group hired an ethical hacker who started to link the sophisticated operations and even managed to breach the scammer’s internal systems, Mr Loyola claimed, adding that information the hacker managed to obtain pointed to the scams being run from boiler centres in Asia.
“(The ethical hacker) got database dumps of victims and he would send it to us,” he said.
“I thought it kind of ended with me and that was it. Then I started to realise, there’s a lot of guys here.
“I’ve been co-ordinating with lots of Australian victims now. I call them up based off the forensics that we find them on. I tell them that they’re being scammed.
“Half the time they tell me to f**k off because they think I’m a scammer too. I’m trying to prove who I am. I even give them my ID sometimes to say look I’ve got nothing to hide.”
‘Power to shut them down’
Being scammed left Mr Loyola embarrassed and ashamed initially, feeling it was the end of his world.
The dad-of-one believes there is a big gap in the Australian financial system.
“At the end of the day, I always say whether it’s $1000, $10,000, $100,000 or a million – it’s all money that you shouldn’t have lost that could have been stopped, in my opinion, by all these places that have the power to stop it,” he said.
“ASIC has the power to shut them down after getting information (and) in this case it could have been avoided but ASIC did nothing. My experience with them has been bad and has made me lose faith in our financial systems.
“I don’t have the power to stop scams as I don’t have the assets that Google does and Facebook and the banks.”
He believes ASIC’s registry should include the official website of a business so consumers can check if it’s legitimate and it “had more than ample time to warn Australians of the scam and post awareness”.
A letter to Mr Loyola from ASIC noted that an unknown overseas-based entity set up a website to impersonate the company so that they could scam investors.
An ASIC spokesperson said it takes scams and the misuse of company registry information seriously and understands the significant harm they cause to consumers and the broader community.
It introduced its “scams takedown capability” and has increased its consumer warnings with the publication of a new investor alert list in November 2023, they said.
“We can and do take action in court against scammers and regularly co-ordinate the take down of websites where possible even though many operate outside of our jurisdiction, removing more than 130 malicious sites every week,” they added.
New group enters the fight
A new Australian group called the Scam Victims Alliance was launched this year with Mr Loyola a member.
Its president Harriet Spring said a group of victims formed the organisation after they “decided they weren’t going to take what had happened to them laying down”.
The aim is to support scam victims by providing practical and emotional support after they have been devastated by financial crime.
Ms Spring said she wants to see more done and is concerned legislation called the Scam Prevention Framework (SPF), passed by the government earlier this year, will not help victims.
“It’s introducing this incredibly complex system. Victims will have to not only take on the banks but they’ll also have to take on the multinational social media companies where they think they might have been the source of the scam,” she said.
“So instead of it being just a one stop shop, it’s now you’re taking on multiple fronts. These are victims who’ve been traumatised, often lost their life savings, they’re completely shamed and humiliated and they’re treated as though they’re at fault because they are held entirely responsible.
“There’s so many players in this but it’s only the actual victim who is the one left not holding the bag of money. The banks are still profiting from this. They profit from the mule accounts that they host. They profit from every transaction they facilitate.”
Ms Spring said she wants to see more action from the government with concerns raised there is no chance of the legislation coming into force by next year.
“What they’re doing is introducing very slow, very heavy-handed legislation and the devil will be in the detail. I just can’t see government being agile enough and I actually don’t know that they should be,” she said.
“If they held the banks to account through quite simple straightforward mechanisms and actually did their jobs as regulators to impose fines and to penalise banks, I think that the private sector would step into this quite agile space in a much more meaningful way than government ever could.”
Chilling impact of AI
Some of the worst financial crimes the group is seeing are romance scams, home deposit interception emails and investment scams where deepfake AI is increasing, Ms Spring said.
“With AI it’s just going to be a juggernaut of sophistication that we can’t even imagine how bad it’s going to get. I’ve heard of companies where financial advisers thought they were in zoom meetings with the chief financial officer and their financial colleagues and it was a deep fake video and this company that I’m aware of lost $40 million dollars in transferring funds with that one,” she said.
“These aren’t foolish people falling for easy tricks. This is predatory … We want to help people change their attitudes towards victims of scams. Scam sort of belittles what it actually is, which is a financial crime.”
Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services, Daniel Mulino did not respond directly on whether the Scam Prevention Framework is on track to come into force in 2026 but said the government was moving quickly to implement it.
“The government has been engaging directly with stakeholders on next steps, and public consultation begins soon. We’re focused on getting it right because Australians deserve real protections that work,” he said.
An Australian Banking Association spokesperson said banks are investing significantly to try to prevent losses after people have already been tricked by scammers.
“We need social media and telecommunications companies to do more to prevent scams reaching consumers in the first place,” they said.
The ABA supports the establishment of a single complaints body that will lead to a clearer and more consistent pathway to compensation for consumers where businesses have failed to meet their obligations under the SPF, they added.
“Banks are actively fighting the misuse of bank accounts. More intelligence sharing between banks is making it easier to identify unusual activity and shut down mule accounts. This work saw the major banks take action on over 13,000 suspect accounts in the 2024 financial year,” they said.
“Major banks have also introduced biometric checks for online new account openings, making it harder for criminals to open bank accounts under someone else’s name.”
sarah.sharples@news.com.au
Originally published as Man’s savings wiped in $80m global investment scam
