Thirteen months, seven figures, and no way in
What an ordinary fraud victim can actually do — and why, right now, the answer is almost nothing.
By Daniel Baulch · written in a personal capacity
I spent twenty-five years on the other side of this problem. I built and led integrity, investigations and anti-corruption functions — in police professional standards, in a national anti-corruption commission, in workplace-safety enforcement, in electoral compliance. I know what it takes to follow money and hold people to account, and I know what stops it.
Very little prepared me for how little a fraud victim can actually do.
Picture a regional community — the kind of place where people know each other. A trusted local operator runs what looks like a legitimate investment. It collapses. Around ten million dollars is gone. Perhaps seven million can be traced. Roughly three million has simply vanished. The people who lost it aren't banks or institutions. They're neighbours, small-business owners, self-managed super funds — some of them retirees who handed over the savings of a working life.
Thirteen months after the first complaint, here is where one of those victims actually stands.
The person appointed to wind up the collapsed business holds everything that matters — The bank statements, the invoices, the accounting file, even a complete forensic copy of the operator's business email — and must refuse the victim access to any of it, on privacy and confidentiality grounds. He isn't being obstructive. He is following the law exactly as it is written.
The victim's own accountant wanted to be paid before returning the victim's own records — And weeks later still hadn't produced them.
The victim cannot reach a third party's bank records at all without starting a court case they can't afford — Against someone with no identified assets to recover. The mechanism exists on paper. In practice it is priced out of reach.
The most powerful tool — compelling someone to answer questions on oath — Depends on a regulator agreeing to fund it. That decision has been pending for months.
And all the while, the evidence is decaying. Device data, email-provider retention windows, cloud accounts, bank records — every month of delay makes the truth harder to reconstruct and recovery less likely.
The person who took the money is protected by rules written to protect ordinary people's information. The people he took it from cannot see the records of their own money.
That is not a loophole. It is the ordinary, everyday operation of the system. And money laundering runs in exactly the same gap — the distance between "something is clearly wrong" and "someone with authority is allowed to look."
Let me be careful about what I am not saying. I am not against privacy. Financial privacy protects all of us, and it should. I am not asking for anyone's bank records to be handed to a private individual to sift through. I have spent my career inside the safeguards that stop exactly that, and I would keep them.
What I am saying is narrower, and harder to argue against: right now, for an ordinary fraud victim, there is no supervised door — there is only a wall, and a court case most people can't afford. Between "do nothing" and "sue," there is nothing. That is the space where victims are abandoned and where laundered money stays hidden.
Other countries move faster
Some jurisdictions have already closed part of this gap. In Singapore, the police and the major banks sit together in a single Anti-Scam Command — bank staff working alongside investigators in the same place — so a suspect account can be traced and frozen within hours rather than months. It is not a perfect template, and Australia is a different system. But it shows what is possible when the people who hold the records and the people who hold the authority are put in the same room, with the law behind them.
Supervised access, not surveillance
There is a better answer, and it isn't radical. A victim, or a professional acting for them, should be able to ask an independent body — under oath, on the record, and for a stated purpose — to obtain and assess the relevant records. That body gathers the evidence, decides what is genuinely relevant, redacts what shouldn't be shared, releases what should, and refers to police what needs investigating — and tells the victim, in writing, who is now looking at it. Supervised. Recorded. Refusable. The opposite of a free-for-all.
We already trust liquidators and regulators with versions of these powers. The question I want Australia to ask is why the person whose money was actually taken has no equivalent path — and what an innovative, fair answer would look like, one that makes justice and restitution something other than a privilege of people who can fund litigation.
The ask
I don't expect a system to be rebuilt overnight. But I do think this is worth the country looking at properly — a parliamentary inquiry, a serious examination of how fraud victims access information and how our agencies coordinate. That is a modest ask. It is also where every real reform starts.
Below the Threshold — Why the Victims of Financial Crime Never Get Justice
This campaign grows out of the argument at the heart of my forthcoming book. Below the Threshold is about the people financial crime leaves behind — the cases quietly closed because the loss falls below the threshold for investigation — and what real reform could look like.
If you've been through something like this — as a victim, or as a professional who has hit the same wall on a client's behalf — I want to hear about it. De-identified, in confidence. The case for change is strongest when it's built on how the system actually behaves, not how it's supposed to.
Daniel Baulch has led integrity, investigations, risk and compliance functions across policing, regulation and anti-corruption for more than twenty-five years. He writes here in a personal capacity.