What It's Like To Find Out The Man You Love Is An International Con Man

Hamish McLaren is a serial fraudster. Remember the podcast Who the Hell Is Hamish? He defrauded victims of their money for more than 30 years before he finally saw the inside of a prison cell.

Tracy Hall was his last victim, losing over $317,000 of her life savings to Hamish while in a relationship with him for 18 months.

Hamish didn’t just financially manipulate Tracy; he emotionally destroyed her. It’s taken her years to recover from that kind of deceit. She processed it by writing a book, The Last Victim, which details her story.

You can find The Last Victim here.

RESOURCES

What to do if you're scammed, defrauded or there is a data breach. Find information here.

Find downloadable tips to avoid scams here. 

Find Tracy's website here.

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CREDITS

Guest: Tracy Hall

Host: Gemma Bath

Producer: Tahli Blackman

Audio Producer: Jacob Round

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters. This podcast was
recorded on It's a Regular Tuesday evening in Sydney in
July twenty seventeen, and Tracy Hall is getting worried. She
hasn't heard from her boyfriend of eighteen months, Max since
early that morning in her rush to get her daughter

(00:34):
Asher to gymnastics camp. It's the school holidays. She missed
a morning phone call from him, but she hasn't heard
back from him since, despite multiple textan calls.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
You're okay, babe, I'm worried about you.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
She writes at seven pm. Nothing.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Please tell me you're okay.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
She writes at eight fourteen pm no reply. Maybe he's hurt.
She starts to worry, frantically googling Max Ta Vita shark
attack into Google. He's a keen surfer. What if he
got taken. After a restless night's sleep, Tracy awakes to
no messages from Max. Something is not right. He always messages.

(01:15):
He never just goes to her like this. She calls
the police and asks them to do a welfare check.
She tries to call his brother in law his surfing mate,
anyone she can think of from his life. Then her
phone rings. It's not him, it's her friend cath Trace.

(01:36):
She says, I'm going to send you a link to
a news article and then I want you to call
me back straight away. Hands shaking, Tracy opens the link.
She sees Max in handcuffs being led out of his
Bondai apartment. Except his name isn't Max. It's Hamish McLaren

(02:01):
and as Tracy is about to find out, he's one
of Australia's most successful con men. I'm Jemma Bath and
this is True Crime Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the
world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who

(02:24):
know the most about them. Hamish McLaren has been known
by multiple names. Often he'd just changed his last name,
but with Tracy, he changed his first name too. His
ability and skill in being able to assume various personas
allowed him to defraud victims of their money for more
than thirty years before he finally saw the inside of

(02:46):
a prison cell. He was convicted for sophisticated romance and
investment scams against fifteen victims to the tune of seven
point six million dollars, but it's believed he swindled many
more than that, and that the actual amount he stole
is more likely to be between sixty and one hundred million.

(03:08):
Tracy was his last victim in total, she handed over
three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars before his dramatic arrest.
But he didn't just financially destroy her. He made her
fall in love with him. And when it all came
crashing down, single mum, Tracy was left psychologically and emotionally broken.

(03:30):
In twenty twenty four, she wrote a book called The
Last Victim, detailing her story, and she joins us now Tracy.
In twenty sixteen, at the age of forty, you joined
a dating app. Well, where were you at in your
life when you decided to make that decision?

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Well, Tis said the scene.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
I had been separated from my husband for just over
a year, and earlier in that process, I'd moved my
daughter and I out of the family home into an
apartment near the beach, and I'd spent that year sort
of getting myself on track again. And it was early
twenty sixteen, and I, you know, I wasn't looking for
another husband. I wasn't going to have any more children

(04:11):
at that point, and I just thought, you know what,
I'd really like a companion. I'd really like someone who
sort of shares my morals and values and someone who
I can just spend some time with on the weekend.
And so I decided to start online dating. I didn't
want to be alone for the rest of my life.
So that's where I was. I had a really big
job at eBay. I was working in the city, I

(04:32):
had a big team. I was busy, I was stretched.
My daughter was five and a half six and she
was in full time childcare at that point.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Do you remember Max's profile.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well, I do remember that he wasn't wearing a Von
Dutch hat and posing with a sedatea tiger in Thailand, which.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Most of we are, I know.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
I mean, he just had photos of him doing the
things that he loved, like surfing and running and hanging out.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
At the beach.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
I remember he had, you know, a megawatt smile, he
had National Geographic blue eyes, and you know, the blondest
hair I'd ever seen, and he just, like, to me,
he just looked pretty normal, like pretty oddy, And so
that's what caught my eye.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
What was his kind of origin story. Obviously you got
to chatting, yeap, what did he tell you about his background?

Speaker 2 (05:24):
What he told me was that he was orphaned at
the age of six, so his parents died in a
plane crash, and at that time he had an two
older sisters that weren't capable of looking after him, and
he was putting to the foster system. And he was
sort of shuffled around in the foster system for most

(05:45):
of his sort of early childhood, and then he landed
with a family in his teens that he met through
school that had three boys, and he became the fourth son,
is what he told me. So he ended up living
with them and sort of growing up with them. So
that was what he said about his childhood, and then
you know, it kind of went on from there. He

(06:05):
was picked out because he had an incredible mathematics brain.
He said that there were people that had, you know,
really focused on him, and you know, there was an
offer for mensa and you know, a whole bunch of
things like that. So these sort of bits of information
came over a long period of time, and you know,
in retrospect, you put the story together that the information

(06:27):
came slowly bits at a time.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
I found it really interesting to read that, even with
that very early story, there was a little colonel in
your brain that thought to google, yeah, plane crash Max
and his last name that he told you was his
last name, and nothing came up. But you didn't think
anything of it at the time.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
No, Well, I did think it was strange, and I
think it is pretty normal. When you meet someone, they
tell you things, so you do a little bit of
sort of sleuthing yourself, and you know, there's generally things
on the internet about people, whether it be their work
history or some football team they played it, you know,
when they were younger, or whatever.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
But yeah, I did.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
I did google some of the things that he told me,
and nothing came up. And I thought, well, maybe I've got,
you know, the spelling of his surname wrong, or something's
you know, I've got the date off or whatever. And
I think the other thing to note is often i'd
google really late at night. So we'd been out on
a date and you know, i'd got home. It might

(07:28):
be eleven, eleven thirty, I'm absolutely dog tired, and I'm
trying to google some of the stuff that he'd tell me.
And couldn't find anything, couldn't find anything, and then by.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
That stage I was just falling asleep.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
So phone goes on the side table and off I
go to sleep and start again the next day doing
everything I needed to do. So I think that was
a really interesting thing in retrospect, was because there was
a vulnerability there because I was stretched, I was tired,
and I had a lot on my plate, so I
didn't go to the level of detail and question, you know,

(08:00):
what I should have.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
But also you don't think to question when someone's telling
you about their life.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
No, especially when you meet somebody. You know, if I
meet you when you said hi, I'm Gemma. I'm a
podcaster now, but I used to be a criminologist at
a university in Adelaide, there is nothing inside me that
would say, oh, hang on, let me just check that
because I don't believe you. That's just not how we operate,

(08:26):
and we take people on face value, because when you
don't suspect anything, why would you, you know, And when
you don't have that level of deceit in your life
or you've never come across it, it's not something that
you automatically think about.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
I mean, I do.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Now I question everything, But previously I'd never met anybody
like him, and I had no reason, absolutely no reason
to disbelieve what he was telling me.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
What was he like to date in those kind of
early days, it was fun.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
You know, he is Alarican.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
He had a great sense of humor, awesome stories. We
grew up in Australia around the same time in the seventies,
and so we had a lot of kind of culture
references that we could draw on. You know, those sort
of funny conversations you have about ads that used to
be on Telly, or you know, different things you'd wear,
or where you went on your some holidays in caravan
parks and all of that kind of chit chat that

(09:23):
we'd have. He was really active, so we were always
doing things. So we're paddleboarding, or we're running, or we
were surfing, or we were walking. Lots and lots of
outdoor activity, which I absolutely love. So the early days
it was fun, and he was an incredible communicator, a
great listener, and so our conversations were very long and

(09:43):
detailed and intimate in a lot of ways, like.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
The plane crash story. He kind of had a lot
of strange stories or kind of. I guess you could
call them fantastical stories, like you know, nine to eleven. Yeah,
he was involved in that.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah, the stories were big.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
And what I've come to realize with you know, compulsive
liars essentially, as you make the story so b that
you can't not believe it and you can't question. And
the nine to eleven story, for example, that came over
a cup of tea, and it wasn't just I was
in New York and under the building when the second

(10:25):
plane hit. It was a very lengthy, very detailed story
that had names and levels and company names and surnames
and wives' names and what role they had within the company,
what floor they worked on, how he knew them, like
all the things that he listed within this big, fantastical

(10:48):
story that made you think, well, I didn't even think
at the time.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
I was just so blown away.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
I was like, oh my god, that's like, that's huge.
And it all matched up with the things that he
told me in the past when he was in New
York where he worked on Wall Street, all of the
detail that had come in many many conversations previously that
when he told me that it all matched and so
again and the level of detail was so big that

(11:15):
I just couldn't. I mean, there was nothing inside me
that disbelieved him.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
But even he'd bring it back up. Yeah, throughout your relationship,
I can't face the I've got to face the wall,
or I can't face the wall, and stuff like that.
So it just kept coming.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
It was very clever, yes, and everything matched.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
So the conversations and the information that came over time,
it was like death by a thousand cuts. There was
not one misstep in that information or in that story.
And I remember back and I think said that last time,
and it all matched, and it was just another layer
to the story, another piece of information. But when it

(11:52):
comes to you in those little bits and pieces, it's
not as fantastical as it sounds when it's in one go.
And that's what kind of course of control and grooming
looks like in terms of I'll just give you a
little snippet of information that will put a story together.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
In your mind by the time it gets to the end. Weird,
crazy story that.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Seems so outrageous, but little bit at a time, it's not.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
The Other thing about the stories is that you realize
now that they were told in a way to kind
of gain two things, sympathy and trust. Yeah, so they
were often quite sad or kind of uniquely making you
feel bad for him.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah, he weaponized empathy one hundred percent, and quite often
people like him will choose someone like me who is
a compassionate, empathetic person because when someone tells you that story,
of course your heart goes out to them. And he
also knew, you know, in those early days, that my
father had passed away young. So I think there was

(13:01):
a part of him that was telling me that story
because not everyone got the plane crash story right.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
There were different.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Stories for different people, So I got the parents dined
in the plane crash.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Now, I think there.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
Was a part of him that knew that if he
told me that, he would gain an extra level of
empathy from me because I had lost my father, so
I know what it's like to lose a parent, and
I had, you know, my heart went out to him,
and you know, and then I'm thinking, he was six
years old. Imagine growing up without a you know, without
your parents and things like that. So he weaponized empathy

(13:34):
to gain your trust and gain your sympathy and kind
of put you on his side, I guess, And That's
how he built his relationships with everybody. It's just they
were different stories for different people, depending on what button
he needed to push for each individual.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Can you explain how he weaved into all of this?
How much money he had, and I say that with quotations,
how rich he was?

Speaker 2 (13:59):
I think it was again, it was it was sentenced
at a time, experience at a time.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
It was many, many, many, many.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Conversations over a long period of time about his his job.
So he told me he was a chief financial officer
at a family office. And I knew what a family
office was. They, you know, manage money on behalf of
wealthy families.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
It is a thing.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
And you know, why wouldn't he be doing that? And
so there were a lot of conversations. I would overhear
multiple conversations of him talking to people in his back
office about the price of stocks, the price of gold,
What was that yesterday, what's it going to close out today?

Speaker 3 (14:39):
We've got to.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Do this by X amount of time. We need to
close out that deal. What's happening with you know, Trump's
press conference and what impacts that going to have on
the market. What about this happening in Tokyo? What about
you know, it went on and on and on, and
I heard people on the other end of his you know, conversations.
So there were people I don't know working with him

(15:02):
or there was there was something going on. I don't
know who these people were, and so it's sort of
built a picture over time. And you know, he had
over that sort of first year that I was with him,
he had five cars, you know, good cars, too, great cars,
and you know, there was a story around each of them.
And I'm thinking to myself, what a jerk, Like, what

(15:24):
forty year old guy who lives in Bonda, I needs
five cars? You doesn't even have any kids, like, you.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
Know, you park five cars in Bonda.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Well, he had a he it was like Tetris like
he had all these car parks that he hired. I
saw four of the cars and I saw a photo
in his garage of the fifth car. Now I don't know,
I don't think this was his car, but I don't
know how he got that car in the garage to
take a photo anyway. You know, So there was there
was those signs of wealth. There was a lot of conversation.

(15:54):
He didn't live an extravagant lifestyle, you know, he certainly
he ate out a lot. He was very generous. He
had the five cars, He wore nice clothes, things like that.
But it wasn't like he was living in a mansion
of all clues or anything like that.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
But he did, as you kind of detail in the book.
He'd kind of point out houses. Oh yeah, Woollemloo for
those that don't know Sydney. There's a finger wolf there,
and there's some apartments that I don't even want to
think what they would be worse. Yeah, And he would
just casually say to you, oh, I lived there once.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, and he did.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
And this is only in retrospect, I've been able to
join all these dots. It was kind of like one
truth in two lives, so there was always something that
was true. So he did have an apartment there when
he was married. I didn't know he was married, but anyway,
you know, he told me he was engaged to this
woman called Beck and she had three sons. Her name
was Beck, and she did have three sons, but he

(16:51):
wasn't engaged. She was actually married to her. And you
know she was an alcoholic. She wasn't an alcoholic, So
there was there was this kind of Spider's web of
some truths and some lies, and in the years following
his arrest, I've had to really untangle that and work
out what was true and what was not. He had
a house at Curl Curl. We drove past it one day.

(17:12):
Oh yeah, I used to own that one he did.
And the cars ended up disappearing because after I made
that kind of joking, serious comment to him about being
a joke for having five cars, the cars started disappearing
and he came back to me. He said, I said,
what happened to the Porsche? And he goes, you know what,

(17:33):
te I've been thinking about what you've been saying, and
you're right. I don't need all these cars. It's ridiculous.
I'm trying to simplify my life. We've spoken about this,
and then suddenly suddenly the cars started disappearing.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
So do you think that that was him molding himself
for you?

Speaker 3 (17:49):
Yeah. He was a complete shape shifter.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
So one of his tactics, in addition to weaponizing empathy,
is that mirroring. And this is what people that con do.
They reflect you back to yourself, knowing that if someone
is it's like a similarity bias. So we are more
likely to love and like and fall in love with
someone who who looks like us, sounds like us, has

(18:12):
similar values to us, likes doing the same things as us.
And all he had to do was listen to what
I wanted for my life and what my morals my
values were, reflect those back to him to me in
the form of Max Tavita, and he knew I'd fall
in love with him, which is exactly what happened. So yeah,

(18:32):
he shape shifted because for other people he was a
different character. He was a barrister for someone, He was
a businessman for another, he was a triathlete for another.
You know, for me, he was this character who reflected
my values of morals. So as soon as I said,
you're a jerk for having five cars, the car started disappearing.
I am pretty certain that if I had said I
want designer clothes and I want fancy dinners, and I

(18:54):
want all the things, then that would have somehow materialized.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Can we talk about sex for a moment, because he
gained the nickname the slow burn, Yes, in your circle
of friends, How did sex or lack of sex kind
of manifest in the way he kind of wound you?

Speaker 2 (19:16):
He just wasn't interested. He was not interested really very
much in physical intimacy that would be handholding and things
like that.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
But yeah, it was pretty.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
It was a massive fizzle. It was a massive fizzle.
And in speaking to other people that know him or
have known him and were in intimate relationships with him,
specifically his ex wife, the conversations are all the same.
So there's obviously some issue there. I don't really know
what it is, but yeah, it was pretty much nonexistent.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
And I.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
It did bother me, you know, because I thought it
was weird. It's just weird, Yeah, and he you know,
I actually ended up talking to my therapist about it,
and she just tried. She essentially convinced me that it
wasn't that unusual and that if everything was falling into line,
then you know, it's okay for things to be, you know, slow,

(20:15):
and if that's not, you know, if that's not really
high on your list of you know, what you want
out of a relationship, then you know, focus on the
other things. And of course he over indexed on emotional
intimacy and conversation and listening and care and support and
just being there. He over indexed on all of that

(20:37):
and then I thought, well, if I've got that and
not that, well, I you know, well, I.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Think it shows how good he was at that. But
you were willing to be like, yeah, all right, I'll
forego that because he was so good at that emotional intimacy.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, And I thought to myself, well, if I can
have one or the other, which do I choose?

Speaker 3 (20:56):
What do I choose?

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Well, of course I'm going to choose the support and
the emotional intimacy. And you know the fact that I
felt completely supported and we were a team and we
were building a life together, and I thought, you know what,
we're not twenty anymore times. This is what happens. That's okay.
I just I guess I accepted it as.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
You fell in love. And because you were with this
man for eighteen months, he met your daughter, you met
his brother in law. Yeah, it got serious in each
other's lives.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, he metaged a lot of people in my world
that weren't attached to Sydney because I don't come from it.
You know, I've lived here, you know, twenty five years,
but my family are all up north and friends and
things like that. So when we went up north to
Byron and places, like that. He was very very open
to meeting my family, my friends up there, anybody that

(21:49):
wasn't attached to Sydney. But he was super weird about
spending time with my friends in Sydney. He really resisted it.
He really resisted me meeting his sister and his nieces.
He was estranged from one sister, so that wasn't ever
on the cards. His parents were of course dead dead, ah,
so I never question that.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
But I did meet his brother in law.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, the brother in law. It was his actual brother
in law, Yeah, wasn't it.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
So, but that part of the con fascinates me because
he was kind of walking on eggshell's there because you
could very well have found out that his name was Hamish,
but somehow you didn't because he was kind of playing
you off him.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Well. It was weird because I looked back and I thought,
how come, you know, why didn't Chris say something? And
what I realized was in the interactions that we had,
and the same with Anna and a few other people,
I never actually used his name. I never actually said hey, Max,
you know, I never said, oh, Max told me this
about you. Because what I realized is in conversation we

(22:57):
actually don't use people's names very often, so we might say, oh,
you you just carry on this conversation. You just assume
everyone is on the same piece of information, you know,
And so I, you know, I came to realize very
quickly that his name was never used.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
But he must have been shitting himself. He must have been.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
And there was one particular time where we were at
his apartment in Bondi and he had the childhood friend
that he grew up with that family. One of the
boys was over and we're talking away and we're reading
the newspapers and what have you, and he called him
the boy. The friend called him handbone in the conversation,
and I kind of clocked it, and I thought, that's weird.

(23:37):
And then he left and I said, why did he
call you handbone? And as quick as a flash, he goes, oh,
because when I was young and we were growing up together,
it was really really skinny, and everyone said I needed
to put ham on my bone's meat on my legs,
so they called me handbone. He did not even draw breath.
It was like he was waiting for that to come up,
and he just had an answer, like he did with

(24:00):
everything I questioned and you know, so when that happens
and you don't sort of that intuitive feeling of when
someone's like, oh, well it's because it was just straight
off the bat down the barrel said what it was,
and I was like, oh, that makes sense. But of
course Hambone is Hamish. Yeah, so these are the things

(24:24):
that I know now, but of course at the time
it's just he must have been crapping in stacks.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
You're listening to true crime Conversations with me Jemma Bath,
I'm speaking with Tracy Hall, the last victim of conman
Hamish McLaren. Up next, Tracy tells me about the first
time Hamish was able to convince her to send him
a large sum of money. When was the first time

(24:55):
he brought up money or the idea of you parting
with some money to invest in something of his.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
It was towards the end of that first year.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
It was around the time of the US election, and
he came to me one day said, I'm proving you
to some information, and I think that there's going to
be something that happens with a very wealthy family in
the US that is going to mean the markets are
going to be favorable.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
You know.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
He had this big spiel.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
There was a lot of manologues that went on, and
so he's telling me this story, and he said, Jewels
and Chris, which was his sister and brother in law.
Jewels and Chris are investing separately to what I'm doing
for the family office clients. And you know, obviously I've
been talking to Jewels about you. And it was Jewels
that suggested that maybe I should talk to you about it,

(25:51):
because you know, I want you to be financially independent.
I can see how hard you're working. And he said,
normally I don't mix business with pleasure, but this is
an opportunity. And Jewels put the idea in my head
and I just thought I'd run it past you and
see what you think. So that was the start of
the conversation, and I asked bunch of questions and he

(26:12):
was very vague with the information because he was like, look,
there are things that I can tell you and there
are things that I can't tell you. And again, everything
was very quick and professional, and he knew the answers.
And I ended up saying to him because I've worked
in finance in my career, and I ended up saying
to him, but isn't this insider trading, Like, if your

(26:33):
privy to some information that is going to adjust the
markets favorably, you shouldn't be having that conversation and getting
personal benefit out of that. And again, quick as a flash,
he goes, you know what, I thought that too. So
I went to my barrister, I went to my lawyer,
and I've had a lengthy conversation with him yesterday about it.
I spoke about Jules, I spoke about you. I'm not

(26:56):
investing personally, but did you know And he just again,
he just had these answers. And it wasn't just oh no,
it's fine and that's it. It was a lengthy, detailed
answer that had me believe that it was all legit.
So that's where that that's where that started, and I

(27:17):
ended up I ended up investing in that scheme to
start with.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
You invested ten K to start with, and then you
kind of let it sit and then he came back
to you to kind of give you updates on it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
I mean as soon as the time had passed, which
he said was the date that passed, he said, I've
got good news.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
You doubled your money.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
And I was like, wow, okay, and he said, do
you drop me to transfer that back into your account?
And I remember being in the car driving and I
thought to myself, I can't deal with that now. I said, no,
just leave it for now. We'll figure that out later.
I was again, I was busy, I was distracted. And

(28:03):
that was sort of where that conversation ended. And then
after that the other conversation and started, so it sort
of merged into that after after a while, the.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Other conversation was about your super fund and that kind
of started a few months later. Yeah, he was very
clever and the way he posed that.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Yeah, never once did he ask me how much I earned,
how much I had in savings, anything like that, how
much I had in my super He said to me,
do you know what you're paying in fees on your
superannuation account? And I said, I've got no idea, and
he goes, you should look into that because they're thiebs,
they're absolute thieves. The money that I make for my

(28:45):
family office clients is extraordinary compared to what those super
funds are doing. And that was the first conversation, and
then it just went from there and again every couple
of weeks it might come up or every now and
again in a conversation, and he was always very critical
of the super funds, the fees that they took and
how they were managing the money of Australians.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
So, you know, he was controversial in his views.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
He was a contrarian and he made no bones about it.
So he had no problem, you know, having a different
point of view to general population. But he'd tap that
in every now and again, and then over time you
just start to think about it.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
So his idea was for you to self manage your
superannuation and for him to be in charge of it.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, so eventually he said, I think you'd be better
off having a self managed super fund because it could
be invested in a way that would make you far
greater returns. You would be paying less fees and you
would be in control of where you invest that. So again,
those conversations came, you know, a lot and over time,

(29:59):
and he essentially groomed me through that process. So he
went and worked with a solar Star to get all
of the documentation that was required to create a self
managed super fund in my name, which is what we did.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
It was completely legitimate.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
I had all of the setup correct and went to
my super fund and asked them to transfer it out
to my self managed super fund. To do that, like,
that's not easy to do. You have to have a
whole bunch of things for them to do that. So
that was all in place. I set up a business
account with Westpac and that's where that's where the money went.

(30:38):
And then the second part of that, and it was
all in my name. And then the second part of
that was he said, we're going to set you up
a trading account with Bell Potter Securities. Bell Potter Securities
training a trading firm. It's very legitimate. I filled in
the documentation, I had my ID signed by a JP.
I was opening up a Bell Potter Securities investment account

(31:01):
in my self managed super fund name, and that's where
it was going to be invested and tracked and everything.
So gave all of that information to him. But the
mistake I made is that I didn't submit those forms.
He submitted those forms on behalf of me, And what
I think happened is that those forms were actually never submitted.

(31:23):
And what I know now is because I've gone through
a financial advisor and done everything properly, is that I
should have had the log ins, the emails should have
come to me. He should have been a you know,
a co you know, have access to it like a
financial advisor does. But everything should have come to me first,
with the logins and everything. I never got those. So

(31:43):
that's how I know that there was never a fund
an investment fund set up at Bell Potter. The check
that I took out from Westpac, which was my superannuation
twenty two year career superannuation one hundred and eighty seven
thousand dollars, I made out a check to Bell Potter Securities,
which is what he told me to do, and I

(32:04):
gave that check to him thinking he was investing it
into my account, and because it was just a pot
of Securities, it didn't have my name on it, that
check went into one of his accounts at Bell pot
of Securities, and that's how he washed the money.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
It's not like you didn't ask for the logins.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
I asked a lot. Yeah, I've still got those text messages.
It's funny looking at them.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
Actually, well, they were very clever. And there was one
example that I've written here where you were in a
process of trying to finalize your divorce and you were like,
do you have that statement on my super for my
legal stuff? And he wrote, yep, yes, can print any time. Yeah,
so he was always very yeah, sure, of course.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Of course, I'll do it when I get home or
I'm just in a meeting.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
That it was always a future future promise, and future
promise could have been two hours from now. And then
of course again because I was busy, I was stretched,
I was distracted. It just you know, and then I'd
ask again and there'd be another excuse, and you know,
these things just sort of went on and on. But yeah,
there was a lot of delay, but never a no,

(33:09):
never a no. And eventually he gave me a statement
that was on Bell Potter letterhead and it was about
six pages, I think from memory, and it had hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of lines of trades. And I'm
looking at it and I'm thinking, I've never seen a
statement like this before. I'd never done anything like that before.

(33:31):
I really wasn't in a position to do that. And
I'm looking at it and I said, well, what does
all of this mean? And he said, the individual trades,
of which there are hundreds, they won't make any sense.
That's how we work the markets and what have you.
But what you need to know is the amount up
the top was the amount that went in, and the

(33:51):
amount at the end of the report is the amount
the value that you've now got in your investment account
Tracy Hall Investments, Bell Potter Securities account. All the details
it was all on what was fake letterhead, but all
on official documentation. So I read that and I was like, oh, okay,

(34:12):
well then that's looking good, and it all looked very legitimate.
So I sort of believed that, and then that was
what sort of the information I needed to Then, you know,
as time went on, sell some tech chees that I
had been that invested while I was working in eBay
and sell those and invest those as well.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
So you made a few more significant transactions in you know,
an eighty K here and a forty K here, because
he was telling you that it was working. You were
earning money on your super like you hadn't seen that's right.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
And also too, he because of all the other conversations
that were happening about the markets and the political impact
on the markets globally and who's doing what, and which
stocks are going up and which are going down, he
was very vocal about us Tech, which were the shares
that I had through my employment, and he said, you know, Tea,
you should sell those because they're at a really they're

(35:11):
at an all time high. And I'd look at them
and I'd go, they actually are at an all time
high because I know how to look at a stock report.
And he said, you know this is going to happen,
and Trump's doing these things, and you know so and
so is doing these and these are some extra taxes
they're putting on this industry in Austraight like.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Everything he had.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
He had all this information, but of course, remember he
didn't have a job, so he had days and hours
to research this stuff to all sort of back up
what he said.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
So if I did look.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
At it, it would it would match, and it did.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
So of course I trusted him. I believed him.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
I thought he had my best interests at heart, and
so I sold those stock and I put it into
the self managed super fund. I was very happy to
hand over my financial security to him because I thought
he was a professional. I thought he had my best
interests at heart, and I thought we were building a
future together. But in retrospect, I should have given him

(36:11):
the after school pickup. I should have given him the laundry.
I should have given him the groceries. I should not
have given him my money. I didn't protect it enough
because again I just felt seen, and you know, I
thought were building a future together. So that was probably
the mistake I made.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
You say it was a mistake, but you've kind of
detailed how clever he was and the flashiness of the money.
I feel like he is a big part of it,
because you kind of mentioned that he would have these
sugar daddy moments where he'd say, oh, you've been working
so hard, Tracy, let me buy you a first class
plane ticket across the world like someone who is conninge you.
You don't think that they're gonna do stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
No, And that was another moment where I just laughed
at him because I was like, in what world can
I take a trip anywhere right now, regardless of whether
it's first class or not, Like I, you know, do
you understand anything about my life?

Speaker 3 (37:10):
I said, I don't. I don't want that from you.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
It felt icky, you know, and I think he was
just testing me to see what he needed to give
me to lure me in, and that isn't something that
impresses me.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
So I was sort of like that just feels.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Icky the and then sort of, you know, over a
year down the track, and had a particularly hard day
at work. You might remember this from the book, and
you know, I was pitching and moaning about work and
I was tired. You know, I was tired, and I
you know, I was sort of expressing that to him,
and he said, Trace, you work harder than anyone I know.

(37:49):
I don't know anyone that works harder than you. I
can see you moving your career in another direction. You're
in your early forties now, you know it does the
big spiel builds you up, biggest cheerleader in the world.
And he says, why don't you quit your job. I
will put a million dollars in your bank account tomorrow
and you can really have a good break from work

(38:11):
and work out what you want to do next. Because
you are talented, you are amazing, You are a hard worker,
and I want you to have that life for yourself.
And I'm thinking, I mean, for a hot minute, Emma,
million dollars, maybe more than a hot minute, I was thinking, Wow,
wouldn't that be amazing.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
I was tired.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
I was you know, I was, I was burnt out,
and you know, I just but again it felt icky,
and I said to him, you know what, I'm just
having a bad day. And in retrospect, had I have
accepted that offer, he would have taken away my only
financial lifeline that helped me get out of the hole
that I was in when he got arrested, because when

(38:52):
he got arrested, I've lost everything, but I still had
my job, so I still had my monthly income, right,
And it's not lost on me that I'm very fortunate
and I was very privileged to have that job.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
It was a good job. I had a very supportive employer.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
I was being paid well and that is the only
way I got myself out of my financial hole. But
he was about to take that away not long before
he got arrested. And again financial course of control, right,
because I would have been completely reliant on him, and
also too in my head, I'm going, in what world

(39:28):
am I going to get a million dollars to pay
you back?

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Like what?

Speaker 3 (39:32):
And I just said, look, I'm having a really bad day.
It's going to be final.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
Just I just need a good sleep, and thank the
Lord I didn't lose, you know, leave my job or
forego my income, because had I done that and he
got arrested soon after, I actually don't know where i'd
be right now.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
Next, Tracy tells us about the moment it clicked for
her that the man she knew as Max wasn't who
he said he was. I want to talk about your friends,
because they they were suspicious from the kind of the start.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
There were some more than others, and I think people
definitely had a point of view. But I guess when
your friend has been through a divorce and has met
someone new and seems really happy, you want to be
happy for your friends. They didn't know him, they hadn't
spent time with him. They may have come across him
very briefly, and you know, I guess from the outside

(40:31):
he was quirky. He did want to just be him
and I. But to me that made sense because we
didn't get a lot of time together because of my
schedule with my daughter. So you know, when we did
get time and they'd say, hey, let's go for dinner
with these friends, he'd say, Oh, I haven't seen you
for two weeks, by a blake, Can it just be us?
And you know, again, music to your ears because I'm like, oh,

(40:55):
he just wants to get to know me, and in
those early stages of relationship, I guess that's what you do.
But yes, there were friends that were definitely suspicious, had
their spidery senses up. But there was only one friend
really that I had told what I was doing with him.
And she is an incredibly curious person, Cath and she
would ask questions and ask questions and she still does

(41:18):
to this day until she gets to the bottom. It's
very not never surface with her. And she'd found out
that he was encouraging me to do my super is
set up for self managed super and anyway, I had
sort of divulged a bit of this information to her,
and she took me for breakfast one morning and she
was crying across the table. And this is my stoic woman,

(41:40):
like I've knowne of like eighteen years. I've never seen
her cry before. And she's holding my hand and she's
got tears running down her face, and I'm thinking something's
happened to one of her kids, Like what could possibly
be wrong? And she said, I'm really worried about you
investing your money with Max, And I was like, what
are you talking about so Trace, I don't think he's

(42:01):
who he says he is. And I was like, and
I was so confused at the time because in my head,
I'm thinking, but you've never even met him, you know.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
But of course she had.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
Heard things, and you know, unbeknownst to me, she was
doing her background due diligence on him, and you know,
running number plates on the car and riding off to
universities in America that he said he went to paying.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Money to get go.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Cath, Yeah, she like she needs an investigative journalist job
one hundred percent. And you know, I didn't know any
of this at the time, and I said, Cath, he's
my solid person I've ever met. You'll see You'll see
when you meet him. He's amazing, and I'm happier than
I've ever been. He's got my back, and you know,
we're building a future together. And I one hundred percent

(42:48):
believed that. And she could see everything and I just
couldn't see it. And I think it's important to say too.
I had my rose color glasses on, and when you're
wearing your rose colored glasses, all the red flags are
just flags. So you know, I didn't heed that warning.
I didn't heed that warning. And I also didn't talk
about what I was doing. And that's one of my

(43:09):
pieces of advice with people with money. Money's really hard
to talk about.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
It is.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
It's sicky.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
It still it's like it's one of the last taboos. Yeah,
And I don't really understand why. And I believe that
had I spoken to five Caths or five of my
best ears about what I was doing, most of them
would have come back and said the same thing. And
maybe four out of those five had had that conversation

(43:35):
with me, a very difficult conversation because she didn't want
to be right. She didn't want him to be who
he was. She didn't know who he was. She just
knew it was off, and she didn't want to be right.
She wanted me to be happy, and so it's a
hard conversation for her to have. She thought we'd lose
our friendship and so difficult but necessary. And had a

(43:56):
bunch of my friends had that conversation with me, then
perhaps I wouldn't be where I am now.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
Well, it ended up being Cath who kind of broke
the news to you that he'd been arrested. Take me
back to jail twenty seventeen, because by that point eighteen months,
you love this man, you trust him, whoheartedly.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Holding a future together.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah, So essentially I had not heard from him in
over twenty four hours, which was very, very unusual. This
is a man I spoke to like ten times a day,
and I missed a call from him, and I spent
the rest of the day trying to get back in touch.
By that night, I was getting pretty worried because I
thought this is odd, and I had a very sleepless night.

(44:41):
By five o'clock the next morning, I was absolutely frantic.
And I was so frantic that I called Bondi Police
and I asked him to do a wellness check on
him because I thought, I thought, maybe there's been a
surfing accident, maybe something's happened.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
I just know, I just knew it.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Wasn't right, And so I gave them all of his
personal details and they were off doing that, and Kath
called me and she said, how are you? And I said,
I haven't slept a wink. Something's happened to Max, and
I don't.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
Know, like I'm really worried.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
And she said, I'm going to send you a link
to a news article and you're gonna look at it
and then you're going to call me straight back. And
she sent me the link to the Crime Stoppers video
of him being arrested, and you know, I was just
in disbelief. You know, I had kids around me running around,
off to school holiday camps, and I'm trying to sort

(45:32):
of digest this piece of information. Of course, you know,
I knew it was him. His face was all blurred out,
but he's very distinct, and I'm like, there's a mistake,
there's something.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
There's a mistake.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
And I called her back and I said, but I
think they've got it wrong, Cap, They've got it wrong,
and she said, I don't think they've got it wrong.
Trace And with that then I was trying to get
in touch with his family, so with Chris, with Anna,
with people that knew him, because I'd been on the
internet all night looking for these people, trying to contact

(46:05):
them to say have you heard from him? And it
was you know that we saw of just this this
video and a headline about what he had been arrested for,
and I'm trying to contact his brother in law, Chris,
and Chris eventually called me back, or he said, call
me back urgently. And in brackets he wrote Chris Hamish's.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
Brother in law.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
And that's the first time I saw his name and
that I called him and he picked up and I said, Chris,
who the fuck is Hamish? Because his whole time, I'm
going it's Max, It's Max, It's Max.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
And because there.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Was no name on the crime stoppers, it would have been.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
A police Bondai business name.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
It said Bondai businessman forty seven superannuation fraud. And in
my head, this is how screwed up my brain was
at the time. I'm like, they've got it wrong because
Max was only forty two, you know, because of course
his age was wrong, his name was wrong, everything was wrong.
And I called back Bondai Police and I said, I
just want to let you know that you don't need

(47:05):
to do the wellness check.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
He's been arrested.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
They said, yeah, we know, but the name of the person,
the age of the person, all the details surrounding that
person that you said lives at that address is actually
not the person who lives at that address. And I
just kind of went, but yeah, it is. Because I've
just spent the week, I've just spent a year and
a half of my life with this man, Like, you know,

(47:29):
I was convinced that it was and they said it's not.
And I said, well, who is it? What are we
talking about? And they said, you'll need to call You'll
need to call the detectives working on the case that
have arrested him. We can't give you any more information.
And that's when everything sort of started to fall apart.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
After that, once you had the name his real name, Yeah,
it didn't take very long to kind of get a
bit of an idea because he'd already been charged at
that point. HiT's certain things.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
Yes, there was a very long list of things that
he had done in the past that he had been
in court for or there had been just laid. He
had lost a you know, financial advisor. I think he
had a future's license. He had lost that. So there
was a ban on him on the ASCIIC register. So
there was once I knew his name, there is a

(48:23):
very very lengthy, you know, rabbit hole that you can
go down and learn all about his crimes over the
past thirty years, internationally.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Blogs with people, yep, every like it was big by then,
even before all.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Of the yeah stuff before it.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of people that were
very unhappy with things that he had done. You know,
Lisa Hoe had been through a trial with him.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Already at that point. Yeah, she is an Australian designer
for those that don't know.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
Yeah, she was one of the victims.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
But she had taken him to court previously about money
that he had stolen from her, and that I believe
was sort of some sort of superannuation thing as well.
So she had gone privately to try and you know,
claw back that money, and that was sort of That
was about six or seven months before he was arrested,
that that case went through, and there was stuff online

(49:19):
about that, but of course it was under the name
of Hamish McLaren, so I never saw any of that
because I was googling Max Tavita.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
So yeah, there's a very.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Lengthy you know, and what's come out from the podcast
Who the Hell Is ham issues that whilst the Australian
police were charging him for swindling seven point six million
dollars from fifteen victims, it's more likely to be eighty
to one hundred million dollars.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
Globally.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Yeah, there is almost not one corner of the globe
that he hasn't stolen money from people.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
That day that you found that out, can you even
take yourself back to how you felt?

Speaker 2 (49:58):
I mean at the beginning, shock, disbelief, denial, which I
think is very natural because I was so confused.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
And to have it all changed within such an instant, It's.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, it was. I think that the hardest thing because
it took me nearly eighteen months to fall in love
with this man. And keep in mind, I'd been through
a divorce, and you know, divorce is not generally a
happy thing for anybody, right, You don't come out of
that intact all the time.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
So I'd been through that. I you know, it had
been a slowly.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
You know, we built the relationship slowly, and I fell
in love with him, you know, but it took me
eighteen months to fall in love with him, and literally
within twenty four hours, I had to come to terms
with the fact that I didn't love this man. But
in fact, this man never actually existed, you know, he
was a fake person. But then there was a part

(50:51):
of me that really missed him. And then in the
months and I'm going to say years after, it was,
you know, a process of putting myself back together in
the beginning.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
There was a lot of stuff I had to do.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
Really urgently, like really practical things like dealing with the
ATO and a non compliant potentially like a fraudulent tax return.
There was my non compliance superannuation fund that had zero
dollars in it. There was you know, the police statement.
Preparing the police statement. I think my police statement was
thirty something pages long. I had to recount eighteen months

(51:25):
of my life, pull out text messages and emails and conversations,
remember where we met, like, I had to remember everything.
I had a six year old at home and I
was on my own. I was a single mom, and
you know, I made a decision very early on that
there'd be no tears at the dinner table because who
was going to get her where she needed to go,

(51:45):
Who was going to make her lunch? Who was going
to get her to her school and activities? If I
was in the feed and position all day, I didn't
have anyone so pressed on in that regard. I had
to get back to work because it was my only
financial lifeline and it was a big job. But I
doubled down. I worked trder than I've ever worked. It
was great distraction, you know, in retrospect, and then I

(52:06):
had to get really smart, really quickly about my money
because I had nothing except my month income.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
Did the police give you any sign at the start,
because obviously all the emotional stuff this man you loved,
But I'm imagining that you then started going my money
because you've invested, you know, over three hundred thousand dollars
with this man. Did they give you any sign that
you might get that back?

Speaker 2 (52:28):
They were pretty honest from the beginning, but they were
very compassionate and empathetic as well. It wasn't a kind
of like you'll never see your money again. But I
think they knew deep down that that money was gone.
They had been They had been looking and forensically looking
at his accounts for months, six months.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
They were Why did they contacted you early on?

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Well, I think I think they they what they were doing,
were trying to build a body of evidence from people
that they So one person had made a complaint and
then they needed another couple of victims to come forward
give information. It's actually very very difficult to prosecute fraud,
really really hard, because on paper it looks like I've

(53:11):
freely given him my money, which I did. Yeah, but
it was done under deceit, it was used for nefarious reasons.
It was a crime, but to prove that it's a crime,
there's a lot that goes into that. And so to
get him arrested and bail refused is what they say.
So they didn't want to arrest him on a very

(53:32):
light case and then have him say, oh, look it's nothing,
give the bail because he was a flight risk at
that point. So they had to gather enough information with
people that they knew would give them.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
The information they needed to do that.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
I was not one of those people, because, to be honest,
I would have probably told him, you know, if they
had come to me and said, Tracy, this is what
we're doing, this is what we're dealing with. I was
in such a deep relationship with him.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
I think it was too much of a risk for
them to do that. You were too close, I think so.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
And I don't know that they were really that interested
in looking at me at that point because they had
these other victims that were giving them all the information
they needed to know that they had enough charges against
him when he was arrested that he would be bail refused,
which is exactly what happened. And then I contacted Tom Zadravac,

(54:22):
who was the head detective, and he said, you need
to come down to the police station straight away. And
of course, you know, I got his real name, I
got all the details, but everything was very vague.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
It was like there are a lot of victims. There
was millions of dollars.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
And I think I had a friend with me that
day and she said, is it likely that Tracy will
get her money back? And they said probably unlikely. But
it was never a it was never a hard no.
And I guess you always hold out hope that through
that court process there's going to be some kind of
recovery of funds. But in this case, and what I've

(55:01):
learnt about this type of crime is that the detectives
and the DPP and the police and everyone's working on
the case, their job is to put him in jail
for the longest period of time possible, and that's what
they did. He got an incredibly long sentence based on precedent. Right,
Their job is not to go find out money. They
don't have the resources, they don't have the technology, they

(55:23):
don't have the time. They are so stretched. And so
you know, whilst that feels unfair. It's like, what would
you rather.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
Is it anyone's job to go and find your money
or is it just yours?

Speaker 2 (55:36):
It is mine because it's my money that I lost.
And you know, as a group of victims, we could
potentially pay somebody to do it. But when you've lost
your life savings and you're trying to rebuild your life,
you don't have money to pay a private investigator, and
you couldn't be throwing good money after bad. You don't know, right,
and offshore money is very hard to trace. If it's
been converted to crypto, it's very hard to trace. It

(55:59):
is a long bow and it's you know, at that
point in time, I didn't have the resources. I didn't
have the mental capacity. I didn't have the mental health
I didn't have I was doing everything demo just to
get out of bed every day. And you know, so
I was dealing with all these very practical things, but
underneath I was dying. I was in the biggest, depressed, anxious,

(56:23):
shamehold of my life and that was not a great
place to be.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
And he was still contacting you, Yes from prison, Yes,
tell me about that, because he wrote you letters.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
Yeah, very weird letters.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Yeah, I mean again trying to gain empathy. So lots
of musings about how hard things were for him and
how much he just wanted a picture of us just
to remind him of all the good times. And then
he'd list out all the good times and how we
were building our life together in this chapter is just
a bump.

Speaker 1 (56:54):
In the road. And what does he mean?

Speaker 3 (56:57):
Yeah, I mean I think the guy was on shrooms
at the time.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
What do you mean, So, yeah, it was it was
quite you know, But I guess you have to understand
too from my point of.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
View, I was close at Straws.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
I was trying to get any information I could, and
so the police couldn't talk to me because it was
a legal case. The authorities in the banks and belt
Potter and everything, they couldn't talk to me because it
was a legal case. His friends and family wouldn't talk
to me, and you know, I got no information.

Speaker 3 (57:27):
So I was just desperate.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
I was clutching at Straws, and he was really keen
for me to go and see him in those early
in those early days months afterwards, and I just got
to the point where I thought, you know, what good
could come of me going to see him. This is
a man who has not told me the truth for

(57:50):
the last eighteen months of my life, and he has
taken all of my money, he's lied about everything. In
what universe is he suddenly going to look me in
the eye and tell me the truth. So I couldn't
trust anything he said, and there was part of me
that felt like he was just sort of trying to
lure me back in some regard. And these letters, like

(58:13):
reading them now, they're just like laugh I mean they're
in the book, they're just laughable in a way. But yeah,
I stopped. I stopped hearing from him when I was
sent a bunch of flowers from him to my work
one day, a huge bunch of natives, and the card
in capital letters said see you soon, love Hamish, and

(58:34):
I threw up.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
I literally threw.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Up in the in the office bathrooms because I just
felt it. I thought he was downstairs waiting for me.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
You thought he'd had gotten bail or he.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
Was out or how does a criminal send flowers from
jail like that says I'll like see you soon kind
of yeah, And it all went along with the letters
that were like come see me, come see me, And
it was at that point that I then contacted the
detectives and because I was just I was a mess.
This was like six months after he was arrested, and anyway,

(59:06):
it stopped very soon after that.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
I know that you kind of did get the chance
to kind of pepper him with lots of questions. Was
any of it true? Did you work with NASA?

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (59:17):
Did you got a mensa? Was he able to give you?
Did he give you any.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
This was truth?

Speaker 1 (59:22):
This wasn't truth? Or he just know?

Speaker 2 (59:25):
He was very dismissive of the anxiety I had around
all those questions, because it was very much a peppering
of what is your name?

Speaker 3 (59:33):
Where did you? Are your parents alive? What is true?
What is not? Where did you go to school? Who
are your friends? What about this?

Speaker 1 (59:39):
Like?

Speaker 2 (59:39):
I had so many questions and he just responded. I
remember him responding with I get hung up on a name.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
T It's just a name. It's just a name. You
know who I am. I'm like, I actually don't know
who you are. I have no idea who you are? Like,
what are you even talking about? Is it Max? Is
it Hamish? Is it McLaren, is it Watson?

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
What is your name? Who are you, it's like it's
just a name.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
You mentioned that Hamish got kind of the maximums sentence.
It was to start with sixteen years with a non
pro period of twelve years as the maximum. I imagine
you would have been pretty happy with that.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
Yeah, I was in shock. That was the next moment.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
I was really in shock because, you know, the judge
read out the sentence and it was it was a
really lengthy court day.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
It was over a two week period and it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Went on for hours, and he had taken the time
to really go through every victim and you know, lay
out the true impact because we didn't do we weren't
sort of able to do victim impact statements or anything
like that, so he was sort of advocating.

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
I felt on behalf of the.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Victims who were all mostly in the courthouse at that time,
and he read it out, and I think in my
mind when I went in that day, I thought, you know,
if he gets five, that's a good act of five
or seven that was the number I had in my head.
I don't even know what I based that on. I
think the police had spoken to ours. There had been

(01:01:11):
a little bit of conversation from the DPP and I
think they were sort of guiding us towards a number
to have in your head so that you weren't disappointed.
And then he read out sixteen years, and I just
kind of had this. It was almost like I blacked out.
It was just like this tunnel, this black tunnel happened
around me, and it just went down to this point.

(01:01:31):
I remember everyone's like clapping in the gallery and I'm
just there going holy shit, Like it was huge, and
I'm thinking, okay, and I'm doing I'm doing the sums,
like what year will that be, how old will I be,
how old will he be?

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Where will I be in my life?

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Like I was just tunneled into that, and then I
came out and I was just like shaking and I
was in shock, and you know, that was a good day.
That was a good day, but it was the end
of a three year process that was very, very exhausting.
So I also felt quite tired.

Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
In that moment.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
But then he appealed, of course, and the sentence was
reduced by four years, so he received twelve years in
the end, nine non prole and his nine years non
parole comes up next July.

Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
I don't want to say signs or how do we
avoid this? But for romance specific scams, what is your
advice to people to try and avoid something like this?
It feels very hard to try and avoid. But how
do we keep our wits about us?

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Yeah, it's a great question, and I would say, trust
but verify, right, So, don't go into the world being
all cynical, be skeptical, don't be cynical, but trust and verify.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
So there are things that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
I dismissed that I should have looked more boldly at
and been more curious about the fact he didn't have
a digital footprint wird, didn't even have a LINKEDINNA but
had of course had a reason for that. Yeah, and
because I asked him about it, and but it had
a very quick response.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
But yeah, odd, odd, massive red flag.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
If you are in this day and age without a
digital footprint anywhere on the internet, there's nothing written about
you like, that's weird. I would say, meet family and
friends very quickly. You need people other people to verify
this person, especially if you meet as complete strangers on
a dating app, which most of us do now, right,
I would say that things like there's reverse image searches

(01:03:35):
and things that you can do now had I have
done a reverse image search on Max Tavita, I would
have found Hamish McLaren.

Speaker 1 (01:03:42):
That's a very sneaky one. Though you don't think to
like reverse image search.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
Your deities, I think you should. I don't think there's
anything wrong with that. You are essentially going on a
date or going to somebody's house that you don't know,
You don't know anything about. You may not have met
any of their friends and family, you may not know
anything about their history. They could be anybody. So I
think it's a safety issue as well. Yes, it feels

(01:04:09):
weird because you want to go into it with an
open heart and an open mind into any type of relationship,
especially if you have a spark and a connection. But
I think it's just it's just one of those things
we have to do now unfortunately. So they are the
things that I would say, be really really careful of.
I think what happens when we get scammed, and this

(01:04:33):
is the rose colored glasses thing is and what scam
is trying to do is they essentially try to put
you into a heightened emotional state. Because in a heightened
emotional state, we actually have less access to our logical
thinking and those heightened emotional states. One of them is love,
because when you're in love, you don't see the things.

(01:04:53):
You know, when you first meet someone and you're in
love and everything's great, and then after three years you're like,
I hate the way he breathes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Well, they call it the honeymoon period for a reason.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
That's right, And you know you don't see the things
because your brain has essentially been hijacked by your emotions. Now,
the other emotions that the scam is and frauds's use
are fear if you don't do this, this will happen, Excitement,
I've got this incredible investment opportunity and you're going to
be financially independent if you do this, or hope. So

(01:05:21):
they are essentially the biggest kind of emotional states that
if you recognize them within yourself, you can actually start
to think, Okay, well, my brain's probably not thinking as
critically as it would otherwise, like a friend on the side.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
So they're the things I.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
Say too, is be aware of your emotional state because
it'll actually hijack your critical thinking. And this is where
talking to friends or having friends involved is really great too,
because their brains haven't been hijacked because they think he
breathes funny and he looks weird.

Speaker 1 (01:05:52):
Get yourself a cast.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Everyone everyone needs everyone needs a cat. We love cap Tracy.

Speaker 1 (01:05:58):
Are you happy now? What does your life look like now?

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
My life is great.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
It's we're suddenly seven years or we're nearly eight years
down the track from his arrest. It has been I
hate this word, but a journey. You know, A lot
has happened. Yeah, there were a couple of really really
hard years and a lot of just I don't know
how I'm going to get out of bed today years,

(01:06:23):
but over time and with the right support and the
right mindset, and you know, having things like my daughter
and my job, and you know, incredible friends, and that's
helped me through, and you know, a truckload of therapy,
all different types of therapy to help me really understand
how how something like this could happen to someone like me,

(01:06:46):
because I never thought it would be me. I never
thought this would happen to me. And then of course
writing the book was very cathartic. So it's been a
journey of just sort of like unraveling the impact it's
had on me to a point now where I have
a fire in my belly to ensure that this does
not happen to one single more person ever. And I

(01:07:06):
know that's a naive thought, but I will do whatever
I can to do it. So I speak to corporate's
full time about this. I work with corporations to enhance
their communications to make sure that what they're pushing out
is effective and impactful. And so that's what I'm spending
my time and energy on now, and that has given
me so much purpose in life. And yeah, I am happy.

(01:07:29):
I mean, he's been in jail for nearly eight years.
I get to see the ocean every day, like, who
is winning?

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
I'm winning?

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
I'm winning. So you know, I think about things like that.
I think about how grateful I am and the life
that I have, and certainly my future is probably going
to pan out a little differently to what it was previously,
but that's okay as well.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
And you found love again, haven't you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
I have found love again, Yes, so you can trust
again eventually. Well, yes, the person I've known for a
very long time. We work together in the early two
thousands at a hedge fund, and so I've known him
for a very very long time. So that's probably why
I can trust him. I'm not sure if it wasn't him,

(01:08:16):
I might be a cat lady.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
I think what I take away from your book and
your experience is that this really can happen to anyone.

Speaker 3 (01:08:25):
Yeah, yeah, it can.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
I think it's safe to say we are all far
more financially and digitally vulnerable than we think we are.
No one thinks it's going to happen to them, you know,
And in my experience, from what I've learned and all
the people that have reached out to me, it doesn't
matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter where you
were educated, it doesn't matter what family you were brought

(01:08:49):
up in, where you've traveled, how intuitive you think you are.
It can happen to anyone because these nefarious characters are
professionals and they're very, very good at what they do.
They're psychological weapons, and you know, we have to be
on the lookout.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
We have to be really vigilant.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):
Thanks to Tracy for telling us her story. True Crime
Conversations is a Mumma mea podcast hosted and produced by
me Jemma Bath and Tarlie Blackman, with audio design by
Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back
next week with another true crime conversation.