Reporting on organised crime, fraud and the institutions that respond to them.
Crime
Stephen Ronald Sonners, 58, was stopped at Triabunna in September 2025 with $1,065,660 in a cardboard box, told police he found it under a bridge, and later admitted he was being paid about $1,000 to leave it in the bush. The Supreme Court of Tasmania gave him fifteen months' home detention. The judge's published reasons explain the charge, the defence he did not run, and the encrypted group chat called Final pass.
By T. Nguyen · 10 October 2026 · 4 min read
Crime
A 45-year-old Killara man was refused bail on 4 July 2026, charged with laundering $2.4 million through his construction business for a syndicate police say washed $150 million for organised crime. The alleged method is the oldest one there is: a real business, real wages, and a fake invoice.
By NOFUF · 10 October 2026 · 3 min read
Crime
On 17 May 2026 China's state media announced a joint operation with the United States and the UAE that had arrested 276 telecom fraud suspects in Dubai. Every number was right, and eighteen days old: Dubai Police and the US Justice Department had announced the same operation on 29 April as Tri-Force Sentinel. What the two accounts share, what Beijing's leaves out, what the scam was, and why the buyers of what those nine dens sold are, on the numbers, in Australia.
By T. Nguyen · 10 September 2026 · 5 min read
Crime
Official crime data says murder in NSW is statistically stable. Police and media records tell a more disturbing story: a gangland conflict in which the wrong people are increasingly being killed.
By T. Nguyen · 9 September 2026 · 10 min read
Crime
In February 2023 the Australian Federal Police arrested nine people and restrained more than twenty Sydney properties over what they called an unregulated multinational bank. The police set out the mechanism themselves. Every entity in it was an ordinary registered company.
By B. O'Connell · 6 September 2026 · 4 min read
Crime
In May 2025 the NDIS Commission permanently banned Horizon Solsolutions Australia, trading as Cocoon SDA Care, and its director, after finding claims lodged for participants who were dead or in prison. Its clients were steered to a company owned by a former executive. By September the liquidators put its debts at about $80 million, $16 million of it owed to staff.
By T. Nguyen · 6 September 2026 · 4 min read
Crime
In two days in early September, a 23-year-old student and a 40-year-old electrician were shot dead in Sydney's south-west by gunmen looking for someone else. The response from the state's institutions followed a pattern. It is, almost word for word, the response the same institutions gave the last time this happened in the same suburb, in December 2003.
By T. Nguyen · 4 September 2026 · 4 min read
