Infamous Criminals Australia: Melissa Caddick and how missing fraud’s case captured the public’s imagination

Missing Sydney fraudster Melissa Louise Caddick is a “pure con-artist” with zero talent for financial wizardry but exhibited psychology’s “dark triad” of personality traits, according to a white collar crime expert.

The 49-year-old, who had been running a $23 million Ponzi scheme, vanished in November 2020, a day after the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and Australian Federal Police raided her palatial Dover Heights mansion.

The corporate watchdog had begun investigating Caddick two months earlier after another financial adviser discovered that Caddick had been using her financial services licence without permission and reported her.

A couple of days before the raid, ASIC had also frozen Caddick’s bank accounts and prevented her from leaving the country.

Professor Clinton Free says Caddick’s scam was “really a fabulous piece of affinity fraud”.

“It was a pure Ponzi scheme and she’s a pure con artist,” he said.

“This is a person who exploited and weaponised her social capital amongst her friends, family members and others, rather than someone who was creating intricate tax avoidance schemes and flogging them off.

“She was using social connectedness to identify potential victims but what she was doing wasn’t overly sophisticated.”

The Nightly is taking a fresh look inside the crimes and minds of Australia’s more recent infamous criminals, whose crimes have shocked the nation and – in Caddick’s case – continue to attract intrigue.

Despite being presumed dead, Caddick – who disappeared before she could face consequences – has nonetheless become one of the country’s most notorious white collar would-be criminals.

The 49-year-old appeared to be a successful and wealthy businesswoman living a life of glittering luxury, in a multi-million dollar eastern suburbs mansion.

In reality, she was a thief who fleeced her family and friends of millions of dollars to fund her extraordinary life of unbridled extravagance.

Caddick, purporting to be a financial adviser, defrauded 72 victims of approximately $23 million between 2012 and November 2020 through a company she had set up in 2013 called Maliver.

However ASIC has indicated her scam might have commenced as early as 2009.

Investors had provided Caddick access to their SMSF in the belief she was investing their money, predominantly in ASX-listed equities, via CommSec accounts.

She tricked her investors into thinking their share portfolios were performing exceptionally well by sending them a fake CommSec statement each month when in fact their investments in fact never existed.

Instead, Caddick was squandering their cash on luxury cars, couture clothing, designer shoes and handbags, jewels, holidays on private islands and month-long ski trips to Aspen.

Prof Free, from the University of Sydney Business School, said Caddick’s modus operandi was not genius or foolproof.

“This was not sophisticated financial engineering that was impossible to identify,” he said.

“It was really the fact that most of the victims, she either knew or had connections to, and they were acting more on the basis of trust.

“That she was a friend and family member in some cases, I think, caused people to suspend their critical faculties.

“It was about trust and identity, rather than spreadsheets.”

The academic – a Professor in the Discipline of Accounting, Governance and Regulation – said Caddick got away with her crimes for longer than expected despite lacking “exceptional financial insight”.

“She’d engendered a lot of social capital and trust with the victims, which is why she was able to get away with it for much longer than you would have thought,” he said.

“Her relational credibility was more important than her financial credibility.

“She was really able to take advantage of the intimate relationships that she had developed and then leveraged those to continue.”

Caddick had been pretending to be a financial planner for at least eight years before she was caught fleecing investors of millions.

Caddick, who grew up in Sydney’s southern suburbs, also lied about her tertiary education in her CV and in legal documents.

Since her disappearance, evidence has emerged which shows Caddick didn’t become Australia’s Bernie Madoff overnight.

She had been committing less serious frauds – including forging signatures, falsifying documents, lying to employers – and getting away with it, for years before starting her Ponzi scam.

“That’s 100 per cent the way it usually happens,” said Prof Free.

“With nearly all white collar crime, even vanilla frauds like taking money from an employer, it’s a ratcheting up.”

Prof Free said that as the stolen millions mounted, any hope of Caddick repaying her clients evaporated.

“Once it got to a certain scale, whether she thought she could or not, there was no prospect of her repaying it,” he said.

“She was spending at such a rate and there’s nothing consistent in her behaviour that would suggest that she had some grand plan to do that.

“Her plan might have been to just leave at some point”.

So when the authorities turned up to execute search warrants on November 11, 2020, she must have known the game was up and her world was about to come crashing down.

She allegedly left the next morning – without taking her phone, car keys and wallet – and was never seen again.

Her son, just 14 at the time, told police he heard the front door close, and believed it was his mother leaving the house, at 5.30am on November 12.

But Caddick’s last confirmed sighting was by ASIC and AFP officers hours earlier, just before 6.30pm on November 11, when they completed their raid and left the property.

Police ruled out foul play early in their investigation and believed she had either gone on the run or committed suicide.

Then in February 2021, a few months after Caddick vanished, her right running shoe – containing her partial remains – washed up at Bournda on the far NSW South Coast.

A three-week inquest in 2023 scrutinised flaws in the initial police investigation into Caddick’s disappearance and the suspicious behaviour of her then-unemployed hairdresser husband Anthony Koletti, who didn’t report his wife missing for 30 hours.

The inquest heard NSW Police did not conduct a crime scene examination of Ms Caddick’s home or the couple’s two vehicles until 19 days after she was reported missing.

The senior officer in charge of the investigation told the inquest there was no evidence Caddick was alive and he believed she died in the rocks and sea below Rodney Reserve on November 12, 2020.

In a report prepared for the inquest, forensic psychiatrist Kerri Eagle said Ms Caddick likely had narcissistic personality disorder.

“Ms Caddick was potentially susceptible to intense shame in circumstances of perceived failure and disappointment by others due to her personality structure,” she said.

“The ASIC investigation would have ultimately been a public and personal humiliation, costing her friendships, damaging her family relationships and destroying her existing lifestyle.”

Dr Eagle said Caddick “could well have regarded suicide as her only escape from the personal and professional catastrophe which overtook her”.

In the end, Deputy State Coroner Elizabeth Ryan concluded that Caddick was dead, but was unable to determine how, when and where she died.

Prof Free said Caddick was no financial wizard but just a con-artist who perfectly exhibits the “dark triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

The expert believes there are a few reasons why her case has captured the public’s imagination.

“Most of these Ponzi schemes invariably are men,” he said.

“I think this story blew up because it involves a female offender and that they found her foot but not her body, which gives it this mythic status.

“It’s very ghoulish and she’s from Dover Heights so she ticks all the boxes.

“There have been other frauds which have been bigger than this but I think it’s the dramatic nature of her end, together with the fact that it’s really a socially engineered fraud, makes it very intriguing.”

Five years after Caddick vanished, her case remains a compelling true-crime mystery.

Speculation and conspiracies about what happened to her continue to circulate.

“I love the idea that she’s off somewhere in Europe with her prosthetic limb,” Prof Free said.

“It’s a magnificent concept and I think it’s great for periodic resuscitation of that conspiracy but I think it’s hard to imagine that she can survive without a foot.

“It does seem like an extreme way of trying to get away with it all.”

Former New South Wales detective Michael Kennedy told The Nightly Caddick was a “false pretender”.

“I’m not surprised if she has committed suicide, but if it comes back that she’s been murdered, I wouldn’t be surprised about that either,” he said.

“There’s a lot of people who would have liked to have seen her dead once they realised she’d ripped them off.

“If she was murdered, it could have been one of many people, but I don’t think she was.

“I think in the end, she knew that it was over and felt she had no other option.”

LIFELINE 13 11 14