August 18, 2024 • 27 mins
It’s like the plot of a Hollywood movie—an accused scammer faking his own death and running off with the cash. Rumours are swirling and gaining momentum and Alex Turner-Cohen wants to find out once and for all.
The Missing $49 Million is an eight-part investigative series by news.com.au, hosted by award-winning finance reporter Alex Turner-Cohen.
Got a tip? Email us: Missingmillions@news.com.au
Read more on this story at news.com.au
Subscribe to Crime X+ listen to this podcast ad-free.
Follow us on socials: Instagram: @newscomauhq Facebook: News.com.au TikTok: @news.com.au
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I can only see two other possibilities. There's a hidden
partner as a hidden partner, there's a hidden partner. There's
somebody else involved in this. Potentially is the other person
the spider at the central of the web, the center
of the web central. So did Alan in fact have
a hidden benefactor who effectively was the de facto silent boss.
(00:24):
So if that was the case, then you have to
assume that he's a co signatory of the bank accounts
and he or she have got the money, have got money.
So that's the first thing that comes to my mind,
is that there's someone else involved behind the scenes who
(00:45):
has somehow benefited from this. The only other alternative is
that he's not dead, and that he's in fact living
off the money, living off the money, living off the money.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Forty nine million dollars vanished into the ether, hundreds of
There's a world changing algorithm supposedly in a safe in
a secret location, and a charismatic fraudster who died suddenly
while the heat was on him. It's the stuff of
a Hollywood blockbuster. If it were a movie, it might
end with the money shot of Alan Metcalf sipping on
(01:18):
a cocktail on a remote beach somewhere, alive and well,
living off his hidden fortune. A fake death is not
just a common movie device. It's also a rumor that
has plagued other similar cases.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Look at Melissa Kaddick, the.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Sydney fraudster who disappeared in November twenty twenty, shortly after
she was raided by ACIK and the Australian Federal Police.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
A few months later.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Melissa's decomposing foot washed up on a South Coast beach.
In twenty twenty three. A coroner declared Kadok deceased, but
rumors of her faking her own death continued to this day.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Alan Metcalf's death has also caused similar whispers.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah, there were that he's not dead, that he's realized
he's taking the money and ran.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
But no, that's that's not right.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
It can't be right.
Speaker 6 (02:13):
I heard it somewhere, maybe someone said as a joke,
but maybe the roomor got around, but people said, mate,
he's probably over there and enjoying his money over some
island somewhere.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
And the investor did right back and said, I hope
it's going to be an open casket. And people are like,
that's pretty heavy thing. To say, But now looking back
at it, he probably had every right to ask because
I don't know. No one knows exactly if he's one
hundred percent dead. There's no been, no definitif to get
proven to any investors, anything like that. And yeah, it's
(02:46):
it's all up in the air.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
No, We're just a couple of people that I got
involved in just a are you sure he's dead? Should
we go and dig up the coffin?
Speaker 7 (02:54):
And some people tell me, I wonder if he really died?
Speaker 3 (03:00):
You think do you think he really died?
Speaker 7 (03:01):
Or who knows?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Because he could be with Melissa.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
With so much money unaccounted for, the possibility that Alan
might have faked his own death, however unlikely, is one
that I can't ignore. So I decide to investigate. I'm
Alex Turner Cohen, a finance and investigative reporter from News
dot com dot Au.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
And you're listening to the Missing forty nine Million.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
This is episode seven resurrection.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
So where do I start.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I reach out to a man who knows exactly what
to do.
Speaker 8 (03:47):
I'm Ken Gamble, the executive chairman of IFW Glibel. We're
a private intelligence firm that specializes in financial crime, and
asset recovery.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Ken Gamble has worked for twenty five years tracking money
and fraudsters.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Around the world.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
The Queenslander is a hard man to pin down for
a chat. I have to wait a month to interview him,
as he was in the Philippines helping out with police
raids to shut down a group of crypto scammers. It
leads to thirty five arrests. We finally meet in my
office when he's in Sydney on his way back from
the raids in a suit. He's relaxed and confident. I'm
(04:25):
definitely not the first journalist he's spoken to.
Speaker 8 (04:28):
We've taken on this kind of role as a frontline
international scam busting company, and a lot of my work
in recent years has been around financial fraudsters and con
men and those types of people. Probably one of the
most highly exposed cases that I've worked on as the
Peter Foster case, the notorious con man who I've been
(04:48):
responsible for sending him to prison a few times and
recovering a lot of money from him. And there's been
some very controversial stories about him trying to get me
killed and all sorts of things. So I've done a
lot of different sorts of work. I've just come back
from a raid in the Philippines two weeks ago. Every
few months now, we're arresting someone somewhere for some sort
(05:09):
of scams.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Ken works with the police across several different countries, sharing evidence,
but he doesn't actually arrest people himself. And if there's
anyone who might be able to help me figure out
if Alan is still secretly alive, it's Ken Gamble.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
I jump right into.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
The concept of faking your own death. My first question
is simple, is it even possible and does it really happen.
Speaker 8 (05:32):
I've worked on cases where people have disappeared and believed
to be deceased. In fact, we have a very large
one right now. He's a con man that disappeared in
two thousand and seven. A lot of people believe that
he's dead, but he's not dead, and we've found him
in Vietnam recently. He's just living under a different name.
So he's a person who wants the world to believe
that he's dead, but he's not. He actually assumed the
(05:54):
identity of a dead person. But he's a criminal mastermind,
speaks six languages. You know, this guy is real smart,
real clever, So I don't think that the average person
can do it. You have to be extremely clever and
you have to have a lot of discipline to be
able to fake your own death, because you know, you've
(06:14):
got to cut everything out of your life, even family.
You have to start again somewhere under a new assumed identity.
And once you do that, there's always a risk that
something's going to come undone like that photograph that could
be published. For example, if you're going to travel, you
have to go through borders. Even airports have facial recognition
(06:35):
software now, so we're living in an age now where
your digital footprint is absolutely everywhere.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
As a private investigator, if someone was believed dead, what
would make you think that they might not be well?
Speaker 8 (06:46):
It would depend on the circumstances of their alleged death.
So what we would investigate is the alleged death. Where
did it happen, How did it happen, who was involved?
You know, that's really the point to investigate. And there
have been some very famous cases where people have allegedly
died in India on a motorbike accident, for example, there's
(07:07):
a death certificate, there's all sorts of stuff, and that
it turns out to be fraudulent, So we would start
by investigating the circumstances surrounding the alleged death to find
out whether or not there might be forged documentation. We'd
have to check the authenticity of a death certificate, did
it really happen, was there any witnesses, you know, that
sort of thing, and if it turned out to be
(07:27):
fraudulent documents where you're dealing straight away with someone who's
faked their death.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
In Queensland, where Alan died, death certificates are only available
to family members, so as a journalist, I can't apply
to view it, but I can look at the circumstances
of his death. Many people have told me during this
investigation that his sudden heart attack wasn't surprising.
Speaker 5 (07:49):
It didn't particularly shock me.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
This is Michael Blake, the former footballer and investor that
we've heard from many times throughout this series, who invested
three hundred thousand and raised another one million dollars for
Safe Worlds. If Alan has faked his own death and
he's living off the money, then people like Michael of
the victims. Michael had got to know Alan pretty well.
Speaker 5 (08:10):
By the end of his life, he didn't look healthy
and I spent a lot of time with him, and
he had to wait on him in that right. But
it wasn't because he's a big eater or anything like that.
But he used to go with out meals and have
biscuits and coffee and tea and stuff like that. But
it wasn't because he was a big eater. But everything
got put on it as body fat. And because say
if he was in Australia, he'd be doing a lot
(08:32):
of phone calls in America and that'd be up. You know,
he probably didn't sleep a lot. He was always working
and he skipped meals because he didn't have time because
always going to a meeting in that but there's always
a biscuit around, so you have a biscuit or whatever,
you know, which is an ideal.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Michael thinks that hard working lifestyle eventually caught up with Alan.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
You know, he just wanted to get up and going
and that was his dream or his goal or whatever
for a long time, and unfortunately it cost him his
life too early.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
So what have I learned so far?
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Alan was a seventy year old man working long hours,
poor fitness, a bad diet, no sleep. None of this
raises red flags for me that Alan's hard to take
is suspicious.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
I can suggest what I can do next.
Speaker 8 (09:14):
From there, you would branch out into family. You'd start
looking at their family members because of all people in
the world, when you fake your death, you want to
stay in touch with someone, your favorite uncle, your mum,
and your dad. You normally want to let at least
one person in your family know that you're okay. And
that also creates a vulnerability for the subject because they
(09:38):
may slip up and want to ring mum one day,
and you know the phone could be tapped or whatever,
depending on the situation. So I think that the family
circle would be that the second place we'd start looking.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I've contacted Alan's immediate family already. As you know, my
attempts with his wife, Mary have been far from successful.
She spoke at Alan's funeral and was quite upset. I
also got hold of the email address of Alan's only child,
Clayton Metcalf, but never heard back throughout my investigation.
Speaker 8 (10:08):
And also the communications of that person prior to the death,
their phone records, their emails. Have a look at the
circumstances surrounding the lead up to their alleged death, where
they suddenly in extreme financial pressure. Was there something happening
in their life where they had to disappear. Was there
an insurance policy involved? Were their circumstances that are questionable
(10:31):
or suspicious? These are all the things that we look
at as an investigator to try to understand whether there
were the three main things that are connected to every crime,
the means, the motive, and the opportunity for that person
to fake their own death.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Alarms are going off in my mind because Alan would
have certainly had motives.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Before he died.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Safe Worlds was crumbling, people were chasing the business over debts,
and the company he had ceased operating with no staff left,
and the website was no longer live. Investors were asking
hard questions about where their money had gone, and some
were already calling it out as a scam, while others
had tipped off authorities. On top of that, Australia's corporate
(11:16):
regulator ACIK was closing in. Alan's office and home had
been raided by ACIK and the Australian Federal Police twice.
The most recent raid happened just a month before his
fatal heart attack.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
There's little doubt.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
In my mind that Alan would have been feeling the pressure.
As for the means, well, there is millions unaccounted for
forty nine million dollars worth of people's life savings that
had disappeared where into safe worlds, the Cayman Islands, somewhere else.
And with that amount of money, Ken says, the possibilities
(11:51):
are limitless.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
Once you have money, you can do anything. That's the
bottom line. It's all about money. With money, you can
buy fake identities, you can set yourself up somewhere securely,
you can hire security, you can do all those things
that will keep you occupied and keep you out of
the prying eyes of the public. Basically, so you can
(12:13):
live on an island somewhere. You can live in Vietnam
pretending to be a retired British military figure or something,
and everybody just takes it for granted and nobody ever
asked questions. So once you have money, you're set for life.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
What I'm learning here is that it makes more sense
to think Alan would have faked his own death only
if he stole and kept the forty nine million, rather
than faking his own death to avoid the consequences of
losing that money by being a bad businessman. Because it
would be much harder to hide if he didn't have
that money behind him.
Speaker 8 (12:49):
If you don't have money, on the other hand, and
you don't have those resources, you're going to have to
rely upon trying to make money. You're going to have
to come in contact with a lot more people. You're
going to have to try and get work and get
jobs or get people to help you, or you have
to travel. You're opening up the vulnerabilities a lot more so.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Just say I was looking to fake my own death.
What level of money are we talking about as a
stab in the dark. Are we talking millions or multiple millions?
Speaker 8 (13:18):
No, I wouldn't say millions. I'd say several hundred thousand
at least to start with, to be able to set
up a situation where I mean, look at fake passport.
You can get that for ten thousand dollars over in Thailand. Drivers' licenses.
You can go on the dark web now and you
can get your whole new identity. You can get drivers licenses, passports,
(13:39):
and the passports look real, they're almost identical, but you
can't travel on them because the code on the passport
doesn't work. But you know, you could be looking at
anything up to ten thousand dollars maybe cheap. A fake
driver's license two thousand dollars in Thailand, identical to a
new South Wales driver's license. But I would say, you know,
a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars or
(14:00):
something to be able to get yourself set up somewhere
so that you could at least vanish. And then of
course you need ongoing income. You need to be able
to live and survive. If you want to disappear for
another twenty years. Depending on the age of the person,
they may have to consider having enough money to keep
them going for that long. So that could go in
(14:20):
the millions.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Okay, so I can't fake my own death anytime soon.
I'm just a few hundred thousand dollars short. But what
about the actual death part itself in a fake death scenario?
Ken has said his investigation would depend on if there
were witnesses or not.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
So do people.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Literally orchestrate a scene where it looks like they've died
or pay off witnesses to say so, or can they
report it somewhere and just get a certificate?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
I asked Ken about this.
Speaker 8 (14:49):
Yeah, so in a lot of countries you can easily
pay people to provide decertificates, money buys anything in third
world countries. So there is a famous case about a
guy who was ind than a Cryptoponsi scheme for hundreds
of millions of dollars, and he was suspected of faking
his own death in India.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Ken is referring to Jerry Cotton, the Canadian CEO of
a cryptocurrency exchange that turned out to be a massive
Ponzi scheme. And if I think that Alan had an
incentive to fake his own death, well then this guy
certainly did. Jerry Cotton left seventy six thousand people out
of a quarter of a billion dollars when he died
(15:28):
suddenly in twenty eighteen. He was holidaying in India at
the time and was only thirty years old. His death
was caused apparently from a freak medical episode involving septic shock.
He took the secrets of his crypto kingdom to the
grave with him. Cotton's death has prompted a wild slew
of conspiracy theories and even a whole podcast looking into him.
(15:51):
Ken thinks there's learnings to be made from this case
when it comes to Alan Metcalf.
Speaker 8 (15:55):
The circumstances around his alleged death were suspicious. There's no witnesses.
The certificate was issued. It was a genuine death certificate,
but someone may have been paid to issue a genuine certificate.
So you may not even be dealing with a fraudulent
death certificate. You could be dealing with a real one.
Countries like the Philippines, you could easily create an accident report,
(16:17):
get someone corrupt in the police to attend an accident
a motorbike. You could run a motorbike into a tree,
and that person could fill that out with the person's name,
and they could actually officially declare the person dead. And
you could pay off the medical people or the local
hospital to say that you were deceased. I mean, money
(16:37):
will buy this kind of stuff. People will do it.
They'll forge the documents, they'll forge your funeral. It's possible,
but the more people you involve, the higher the risk
of being compromised. There's an array of places in the
world where you can go, countries Africa, Third World countries,
in Southeast Asia, even Middle Eastern countries. There's so many
(16:58):
places you could go and create a trail of forged
documents if necessary. But you'd only do that if you
were going to make a claim, you know, if there's
going to be an insurance payout or It really depends
on the circumstances. But there's a whole array of things
that one can do if you've got money.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
I can't find out anything about Alan and his life insurance.
That's all protected information that I can't access. What I
can tell you is that Mary is not living like
a woman who's inherited a great deal of money. When
I visited her at her rental in Queensland, it was
a modest home and there aren't any other indicators of
having extravagant purchases. And on Ken's other point, if Alan
(17:38):
did fake his death, then he took the higher risk
option of having a funeral, meaning lots of people were involved,
making the risk of getting compromised even higher. If he
had done that, it would be likely at least one
of those people would have let something slip. I've been
looking into this for a year now and I've heard
nothing other than rumors.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Michael Blaze thought the funeral was legitimate.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
He even carried the coffin, and he says it wasn't light.
How many people had to carry the coffin. Was there
like four of you or was there more?
Speaker 4 (18:11):
No?
Speaker 5 (18:12):
I think there might have been eight to ten.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
About that. I've seen the footage of Alan's funeral and
it looked real, and I have no actual evidence to
believe it's faked. But other things do seem like red flags,
like the way Alan's set up offshore companies in notorious
tax havens. I tell Ken about Alan's links to the
Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands and ask are
(18:36):
they a good place to escape to?
Speaker 8 (18:38):
No, British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, those countries are
not the place you'd go if you're going to fake
your death because they're small. They're too small, and when
you're in a very small country, everyone's going to know
you very quickly, particularly a new face on the block.
It's too dangerous to go to a place like that. Plus,
those countries are also regulated. There's a good rule of
(19:02):
law there. They're very popular places for people to have
offshore bank accounts, but not go there, not physically go there.
If someone was going to fake your death, you'd go
to somewhere like the Philippines. Philippine islands. For example, Thailand,
Thailand and Philippines and Indonesia would be the three most
common countries in Southeast Asia where people go that don't
(19:22):
want to be found. And we know that because we've
found so many fugitives in these countries. Cambodia as well,
but Cambodia is not as big, not as much space
to move around. Thailand, indonesiaan and Philippines certainly in this
region of the world would be the number one places
to go.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
So Southeast Asia is the best place to go. And
those countries are just as stones throw away from Australia.
Did Alan have any connections there? Not that I can see.
And there is another obstacle that comes with attempting to
leave the country. Even if you managed to find documents
that could get you through customs, there's the risk of
facial recognition. It's a technology that can relies on.
Speaker 8 (20:01):
The big breakthrough is facial recognition technology and biometrics. You know, fingerprinting,
and you go to Bangkok, any of these countries, Thailand,
You've got to put your fingerprint in. So it is
really becoming increasingly more difficult and governments have been more
vigilant to this type of crime, of people moving across
borders that may have false identity. So I think it's
(20:24):
a risky thing to do, and I think it's only
going to get better and easier for people like us.
We're having this sort of commercially available, you know, search
engines and this sort of technology to be able to
find these types of people.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Ken's private detective business has a subscription to this software
called Pimies, which allows him to do this kind of
search by matching the face with any other image of
the person posted online. It's much better than reverse image
search on Google. Once Ken ran a search and got
a hit on a Russian man present dead who'd actually
been hiding out in Thailand for years. After our interview,
(21:05):
as I walk Can out of the building, I ask
him if he's willing to run Alan's photograph through this program,
and he agrees, so I send him through a grainy
photo of Alan.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Ken emails me.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Back the results. There's a brief moment of excitement when
I realize he's had a hit and it's for a
photo that's been taken since February twenty seventeen, the date
of Alan's death. But it's a false result. The man
though similar is definitely not Alan. But stranger than that,
Ken says was the lack of photos of Allan online
(21:38):
at all. That false positive is the only photo at
all that the program picked up of the late Alan Metcalf.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
We jump online to discuss this. I ask him if that's.
Speaker 8 (21:49):
Unusual, very unusual, absolutely, you know, someone that has been
spooking a company like this and has been making the
type of claims that he's making. I'm very surprised that
there's not more photos. There should be a bunch of
photos of him online. You know, normally these things end
up in some sort of articles. It's a controversial subject
(22:10):
that he's talking about. So when someone speaks about something controversial,
there's always a lot of people that want to post
about that. So I'm surprised there's not more images of
this guy on the internet. That to me kind of
was a red flag.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
So what do you think that means when there's just
not many pictures of them on the internet.
Speaker 8 (22:28):
Well, one thing it means is that someone may have
changed their identity, their real identity. They could have changed
their name, they could have had a criminal record, and
they could have suddenly sprung up under a brand new identity.
For a person his age to not have any images
on Google, which has been in operation now for over
(22:48):
thirty years, that's unusual. The other reason why somebody's photos
would have disappeared is that they can hire an internet
clean up company and they can get their images removed.
I mean people can do that. It's a red flag,
and I tend to think that there's some reason that
we don't know about why he has either cleaned up
(23:10):
his image on the Internet or why he doesn't have
more published photos. A man of his age and with
his alleged credentials, I'm very surprised that there's nothing more there.
So I think if you dug deeper, I think you
would find that there may be some adverse reason why
he's not there.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
But I have dug deeply into Alan's history and I
don't think the situation Ken's describing applies here. I found
information and photos from when Alan was quite young, not
to mention the numerous YouTube videos he made. The other
option is internet cleanup companies otherwise known as reputation management services.
I do some research and learn they work in a
(23:50):
number of ways. Most of them have a goal of
driving negative search results about their clients off the first
page or two of Google, as very few people will
ever look past that. They do this in a variety
of ways. Some will create new positive blog posts and
articles about you designed to reach the top of Google
and push the negative results further down. Others issued takedown
(24:12):
notices and copyright claims to have content removed from news articles.
There are a number of these services in Australia, and
precisely zero of them are willing to talk to me.
It's hardly surprising given the nature of their jobs. While
Alan's use of one of these services is entirely possible,
I can't prove it one way or the other, and
(24:33):
so I find myself at another dead end. To answer
the question that many have whispered about, is Alan dead?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
I believe he is.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
While there might have been motive and means to disappear,
there are no signs of life, no suspicious trails of money,
no flags on facial recognition searches. His death was, by
all accounts, unsurprising. There's nothing substantial to suggest he managed
to vanish to a level that has been undetectable in
the modern world. This was one of the many rabbit
(25:06):
holes I've gone down in search of the missing millions,
and I'm running out of.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Theories to prove or disprove.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
But there's one more possibility and it involves us megachurches
and ex President Donald Trump. Next episode is my final
chance to find the money before it slips through my fingers.
Speaker 8 (25:29):
No Mighty better take control of this country.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And if the politicians are not going to do it,
I fear that citizens are in the first beginning.
Speaker 6 (25:37):
If America embraces this technology, the American dream of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of personal happiness can be given to
the world to enshrine the American dream forever.
Speaker 7 (25:50):
A lot of the money involved in American politics as
a scam, which is probably a particular to you guys
as well. The very very common thing in American politics
is they find someone who is rather naive. There's a
lot of money, you can believe that if they donate money,
they'll get something, and then the money just gets parketed.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I just kept thinking of myself, there's money vanishing here
for sure.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Thanks for listening. A new episode is coming out weekly.
Wherever you get your podcasts, make sure you subscribe so
you don't miss an episode. Head to news Dot com
dot Au to read more of my reporting on this story.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Do you know more?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Get in touch through our dedicated tip inbox Missing Millions
at news dot com dot au or contact me directly
on Alex dot Turner, Dash Cohen at news dot com dodau,
or look me up on Twitter to get my details.
I'm your host, Alex Turner Cohen. Nina Young is the
executive producer, sound design and editing by Tiffany Dimack. Our
(26:47):
editorial director is Dan Box. Grant McAvaney is our legal advisor,
and Kerry Warren is the editor of news dot com
Today U
I can only see two other possibilities. There's a hidden
partner as a hidden partner, there's a hidden partner. There's
somebody else involved in this. Potentially is the other person
the spider at the central of the web, the center
of the web central. So did Alan in fact have
a hidden benefactor who effectively was the de facto silent boss.
(00:24):
So if that was the case, then you have to
assume that he's a co signatory of the bank accounts
and he or she have got the money, have got money.
So that's the first thing that comes to my mind,
is that there's someone else involved behind the scenes who
(00:45):
has somehow benefited from this. The only other alternative is
that he's not dead, and that he's in fact living
off the money, living off the money, living off the money.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Forty nine million dollars vanished into the ether, hundreds of
There's a world changing algorithm supposedly in a safe in
a secret location, and a charismatic fraudster who died suddenly
while the heat was on him. It's the stuff of
a Hollywood blockbuster. If it were a movie, it might
end with the money shot of Alan Metcalf sipping on
(01:18):
a cocktail on a remote beach somewhere, alive and well,
living off his hidden fortune. A fake death is not
just a common movie device. It's also a rumor that
has plagued other similar cases.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Look at Melissa Kaddick, the.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Sydney fraudster who disappeared in November twenty twenty, shortly after
she was raided by ACIK and the Australian Federal Police.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
A few months later.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Melissa's decomposing foot washed up on a South Coast beach.
In twenty twenty three. A coroner declared Kadok deceased, but
rumors of her faking her own death continued to this day.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Alan Metcalf's death has also caused similar whispers.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah, there were that he's not dead, that he's realized
he's taking the money and ran.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
But no, that's that's not right.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
It can't be right.
Speaker 6 (02:13):
I heard it somewhere, maybe someone said as a joke,
but maybe the roomor got around, but people said, mate,
he's probably over there and enjoying his money over some
island somewhere.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
And the investor did right back and said, I hope
it's going to be an open casket. And people are like,
that's pretty heavy thing. To say, But now looking back
at it, he probably had every right to ask because
I don't know. No one knows exactly if he's one
hundred percent dead. There's no been, no definitif to get
proven to any investors, anything like that. And yeah, it's
(02:46):
it's all up in the air.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
No, We're just a couple of people that I got
involved in just a are you sure he's dead? Should
we go and dig up the coffin?
Speaker 7 (02:54):
And some people tell me, I wonder if he really died?
Speaker 3 (03:00):
You think do you think he really died?
Speaker 7 (03:01):
Or who knows?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Because he could be with Melissa.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
With so much money unaccounted for, the possibility that Alan
might have faked his own death, however unlikely, is one
that I can't ignore. So I decide to investigate. I'm
Alex Turner Cohen, a finance and investigative reporter from News
dot com dot Au.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
And you're listening to the Missing forty nine Million.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
This is episode seven resurrection.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
So where do I start.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I reach out to a man who knows exactly what
to do.
Speaker 8 (03:47):
I'm Ken Gamble, the executive chairman of IFW Glibel. We're
a private intelligence firm that specializes in financial crime, and
asset recovery.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Ken Gamble has worked for twenty five years tracking money
and fraudsters.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Around the world.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
The Queenslander is a hard man to pin down for
a chat. I have to wait a month to interview him,
as he was in the Philippines helping out with police
raids to shut down a group of crypto scammers. It
leads to thirty five arrests. We finally meet in my
office when he's in Sydney on his way back from
the raids in a suit. He's relaxed and confident. I'm
(04:25):
definitely not the first journalist he's spoken to.
Speaker 8 (04:28):
We've taken on this kind of role as a frontline
international scam busting company, and a lot of my work
in recent years has been around financial fraudsters and con
men and those types of people. Probably one of the
most highly exposed cases that I've worked on as the
Peter Foster case, the notorious con man who I've been
(04:48):
responsible for sending him to prison a few times and
recovering a lot of money from him. And there's been
some very controversial stories about him trying to get me
killed and all sorts of things. So I've done a
lot of different sorts of work. I've just come back
from a raid in the Philippines two weeks ago. Every
few months now, we're arresting someone somewhere for some sort
(05:09):
of scams.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Ken works with the police across several different countries, sharing evidence,
but he doesn't actually arrest people himself. And if there's
anyone who might be able to help me figure out
if Alan is still secretly alive, it's Ken Gamble.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
I jump right into.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
The concept of faking your own death. My first question
is simple, is it even possible and does it really happen.
Speaker 8 (05:32):
I've worked on cases where people have disappeared and believed
to be deceased. In fact, we have a very large
one right now. He's a con man that disappeared in
two thousand and seven. A lot of people believe that
he's dead, but he's not dead, and we've found him
in Vietnam recently. He's just living under a different name.
So he's a person who wants the world to believe
that he's dead, but he's not. He actually assumed the
(05:54):
identity of a dead person. But he's a criminal mastermind,
speaks six languages. You know, this guy is real smart,
real clever, So I don't think that the average person
can do it. You have to be extremely clever and
you have to have a lot of discipline to be
able to fake your own death, because you know, you've
(06:14):
got to cut everything out of your life, even family.
You have to start again somewhere under a new assumed identity.
And once you do that, there's always a risk that
something's going to come undone like that photograph that could
be published. For example, if you're going to travel, you
have to go through borders. Even airports have facial recognition
(06:35):
software now, so we're living in an age now where
your digital footprint is absolutely everywhere.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
As a private investigator, if someone was believed dead, what
would make you think that they might not be well?
Speaker 8 (06:46):
It would depend on the circumstances of their alleged death.
So what we would investigate is the alleged death. Where
did it happen, How did it happen, who was involved?
You know, that's really the point to investigate. And there
have been some very famous cases where people have allegedly
died in India on a motorbike accident, for example, there's
(07:07):
a death certificate, there's all sorts of stuff, and that
it turns out to be fraudulent, So we would start
by investigating the circumstances surrounding the alleged death to find
out whether or not there might be forged documentation. We'd
have to check the authenticity of a death certificate, did
it really happen, was there any witnesses, you know, that
sort of thing, and if it turned out to be
(07:27):
fraudulent documents where you're dealing straight away with someone who's
faked their death.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
In Queensland, where Alan died, death certificates are only available
to family members, so as a journalist, I can't apply
to view it, but I can look at the circumstances
of his death. Many people have told me during this
investigation that his sudden heart attack wasn't surprising.
Speaker 5 (07:49):
It didn't particularly shock me.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
This is Michael Blake, the former footballer and investor that
we've heard from many times throughout this series, who invested
three hundred thousand and raised another one million dollars for
Safe Worlds. If Alan has faked his own death and
he's living off the money, then people like Michael of
the victims. Michael had got to know Alan pretty well.
Speaker 5 (08:10):
By the end of his life, he didn't look healthy
and I spent a lot of time with him, and
he had to wait on him in that right. But
it wasn't because he's a big eater or anything like that.
But he used to go with out meals and have
biscuits and coffee and tea and stuff like that. But
it wasn't because he was a big eater. But everything
got put on it as body fat. And because say
if he was in Australia, he'd be doing a lot
(08:32):
of phone calls in America and that'd be up. You know,
he probably didn't sleep a lot. He was always working
and he skipped meals because he didn't have time because
always going to a meeting in that but there's always
a biscuit around, so you have a biscuit or whatever,
you know, which is an ideal.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Michael thinks that hard working lifestyle eventually caught up with Alan.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
You know, he just wanted to get up and going
and that was his dream or his goal or whatever
for a long time, and unfortunately it cost him his
life too early.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
So what have I learned so far?
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Alan was a seventy year old man working long hours,
poor fitness, a bad diet, no sleep. None of this
raises red flags for me that Alan's hard to take
is suspicious.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
I can suggest what I can do next.
Speaker 8 (09:14):
From there, you would branch out into family. You'd start
looking at their family members because of all people in
the world, when you fake your death, you want to
stay in touch with someone, your favorite uncle, your mum,
and your dad. You normally want to let at least
one person in your family know that you're okay. And
that also creates a vulnerability for the subject because they
(09:38):
may slip up and want to ring mum one day,
and you know the phone could be tapped or whatever,
depending on the situation. So I think that the family
circle would be that the second place we'd start looking.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I've contacted Alan's immediate family already. As you know, my
attempts with his wife, Mary have been far from successful.
She spoke at Alan's funeral and was quite upset. I
also got hold of the email address of Alan's only child,
Clayton Metcalf, but never heard back throughout my investigation.
Speaker 8 (10:08):
And also the communications of that person prior to the death,
their phone records, their emails. Have a look at the
circumstances surrounding the lead up to their alleged death, where
they suddenly in extreme financial pressure. Was there something happening
in their life where they had to disappear. Was there
an insurance policy involved? Were their circumstances that are questionable
(10:31):
or suspicious? These are all the things that we look
at as an investigator to try to understand whether there
were the three main things that are connected to every crime,
the means, the motive, and the opportunity for that person
to fake their own death.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Alarms are going off in my mind because Alan would
have certainly had motives.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Before he died.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Safe Worlds was crumbling, people were chasing the business over debts,
and the company he had ceased operating with no staff left,
and the website was no longer live. Investors were asking
hard questions about where their money had gone, and some
were already calling it out as a scam, while others
had tipped off authorities. On top of that, Australia's corporate
(11:16):
regulator ACIK was closing in. Alan's office and home had
been raided by ACIK and the Australian Federal Police twice.
The most recent raid happened just a month before his
fatal heart attack.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
There's little doubt.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
In my mind that Alan would have been feeling the pressure.
As for the means, well, there is millions unaccounted for
forty nine million dollars worth of people's life savings that
had disappeared where into safe worlds, the Cayman Islands, somewhere else.
And with that amount of money, Ken says, the possibilities
(11:51):
are limitless.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
Once you have money, you can do anything. That's the
bottom line. It's all about money. With money, you can
buy fake identities, you can set yourself up somewhere securely,
you can hire security, you can do all those things
that will keep you occupied and keep you out of
the prying eyes of the public. Basically, so you can
(12:13):
live on an island somewhere. You can live in Vietnam
pretending to be a retired British military figure or something,
and everybody just takes it for granted and nobody ever
asked questions. So once you have money, you're set for life.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
What I'm learning here is that it makes more sense
to think Alan would have faked his own death only
if he stole and kept the forty nine million, rather
than faking his own death to avoid the consequences of
losing that money by being a bad businessman. Because it
would be much harder to hide if he didn't have
that money behind him.
Speaker 8 (12:49):
If you don't have money, on the other hand, and
you don't have those resources, you're going to have to
rely upon trying to make money. You're going to have
to come in contact with a lot more people. You're
going to have to try and get work and get
jobs or get people to help you, or you have
to travel. You're opening up the vulnerabilities a lot more so.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Just say I was looking to fake my own death.
What level of money are we talking about as a
stab in the dark. Are we talking millions or multiple millions?
Speaker 8 (13:18):
No, I wouldn't say millions. I'd say several hundred thousand
at least to start with, to be able to set
up a situation where I mean, look at fake passport.
You can get that for ten thousand dollars over in Thailand. Drivers' licenses.
You can go on the dark web now and you
can get your whole new identity. You can get drivers licenses, passports,
(13:39):
and the passports look real, they're almost identical, but you
can't travel on them because the code on the passport
doesn't work. But you know, you could be looking at
anything up to ten thousand dollars maybe cheap. A fake
driver's license two thousand dollars in Thailand, identical to a
new South Wales driver's license. But I would say, you know,
a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars or
(14:00):
something to be able to get yourself set up somewhere
so that you could at least vanish. And then of
course you need ongoing income. You need to be able
to live and survive. If you want to disappear for
another twenty years. Depending on the age of the person,
they may have to consider having enough money to keep
them going for that long. So that could go in
(14:20):
the millions.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Okay, so I can't fake my own death anytime soon.
I'm just a few hundred thousand dollars short. But what
about the actual death part itself in a fake death scenario?
Ken has said his investigation would depend on if there
were witnesses or not.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
So do people.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Literally orchestrate a scene where it looks like they've died
or pay off witnesses to say so, or can they
report it somewhere and just get a certificate?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
I asked Ken about this.
Speaker 8 (14:49):
Yeah, so in a lot of countries you can easily
pay people to provide decertificates, money buys anything in third
world countries. So there is a famous case about a
guy who was ind than a Cryptoponsi scheme for hundreds
of millions of dollars, and he was suspected of faking
his own death in India.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Ken is referring to Jerry Cotton, the Canadian CEO of
a cryptocurrency exchange that turned out to be a massive
Ponzi scheme. And if I think that Alan had an
incentive to fake his own death, well then this guy
certainly did. Jerry Cotton left seventy six thousand people out
of a quarter of a billion dollars when he died
(15:28):
suddenly in twenty eighteen. He was holidaying in India at
the time and was only thirty years old. His death
was caused apparently from a freak medical episode involving septic shock.
He took the secrets of his crypto kingdom to the
grave with him. Cotton's death has prompted a wild slew
of conspiracy theories and even a whole podcast looking into him.
(15:51):
Ken thinks there's learnings to be made from this case
when it comes to Alan Metcalf.
Speaker 8 (15:55):
The circumstances around his alleged death were suspicious. There's no witnesses.
The certificate was issued. It was a genuine death certificate,
but someone may have been paid to issue a genuine certificate.
So you may not even be dealing with a fraudulent
death certificate. You could be dealing with a real one.
Countries like the Philippines, you could easily create an accident report,
(16:17):
get someone corrupt in the police to attend an accident
a motorbike. You could run a motorbike into a tree,
and that person could fill that out with the person's name,
and they could actually officially declare the person dead. And
you could pay off the medical people or the local
hospital to say that you were deceased. I mean, money
(16:37):
will buy this kind of stuff. People will do it.
They'll forge the documents, they'll forge your funeral. It's possible,
but the more people you involve, the higher the risk
of being compromised. There's an array of places in the
world where you can go, countries Africa, Third World countries,
in Southeast Asia, even Middle Eastern countries. There's so many
(16:58):
places you could go and create a trail of forged
documents if necessary. But you'd only do that if you
were going to make a claim, you know, if there's
going to be an insurance payout or It really depends
on the circumstances. But there's a whole array of things
that one can do if you've got money.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
I can't find out anything about Alan and his life insurance.
That's all protected information that I can't access. What I
can tell you is that Mary is not living like
a woman who's inherited a great deal of money. When
I visited her at her rental in Queensland, it was
a modest home and there aren't any other indicators of
having extravagant purchases. And on Ken's other point, if Alan
(17:38):
did fake his death, then he took the higher risk
option of having a funeral, meaning lots of people were involved,
making the risk of getting compromised even higher. If he
had done that, it would be likely at least one
of those people would have let something slip. I've been
looking into this for a year now and I've heard
nothing other than rumors.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Michael Blaze thought the funeral was legitimate.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
He even carried the coffin, and he says it wasn't light.
How many people had to carry the coffin. Was there
like four of you or was there more?
Speaker 4 (18:11):
No?
Speaker 5 (18:12):
I think there might have been eight to ten.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
About that. I've seen the footage of Alan's funeral and
it looked real, and I have no actual evidence to
believe it's faked. But other things do seem like red flags,
like the way Alan's set up offshore companies in notorious
tax havens. I tell Ken about Alan's links to the
Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands and ask are
(18:36):
they a good place to escape to?
Speaker 8 (18:38):
No, British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, those countries are
not the place you'd go if you're going to fake
your death because they're small. They're too small, and when
you're in a very small country, everyone's going to know
you very quickly, particularly a new face on the block.
It's too dangerous to go to a place like that. Plus,
those countries are also regulated. There's a good rule of
(19:02):
law there. They're very popular places for people to have
offshore bank accounts, but not go there, not physically go there.
If someone was going to fake your death, you'd go
to somewhere like the Philippines. Philippine islands. For example, Thailand,
Thailand and Philippines and Indonesia would be the three most
common countries in Southeast Asia where people go that don't
(19:22):
want to be found. And we know that because we've
found so many fugitives in these countries. Cambodia as well,
but Cambodia is not as big, not as much space
to move around. Thailand, indonesiaan and Philippines certainly in this
region of the world would be the number one places
to go.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
So Southeast Asia is the best place to go. And
those countries are just as stones throw away from Australia.
Did Alan have any connections there? Not that I can see.
And there is another obstacle that comes with attempting to
leave the country. Even if you managed to find documents
that could get you through customs, there's the risk of
facial recognition. It's a technology that can relies on.
Speaker 8 (20:01):
The big breakthrough is facial recognition technology and biometrics. You know, fingerprinting,
and you go to Bangkok, any of these countries, Thailand,
You've got to put your fingerprint in. So it is
really becoming increasingly more difficult and governments have been more
vigilant to this type of crime, of people moving across
borders that may have false identity. So I think it's
(20:24):
a risky thing to do, and I think it's only
going to get better and easier for people like us.
We're having this sort of commercially available, you know, search
engines and this sort of technology to be able to
find these types of people.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Ken's private detective business has a subscription to this software
called Pimies, which allows him to do this kind of
search by matching the face with any other image of
the person posted online. It's much better than reverse image
search on Google. Once Ken ran a search and got
a hit on a Russian man present dead who'd actually
been hiding out in Thailand for years. After our interview,
(21:05):
as I walk Can out of the building, I ask
him if he's willing to run Alan's photograph through this program,
and he agrees, so I send him through a grainy
photo of Alan.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Ken emails me.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Back the results. There's a brief moment of excitement when
I realize he's had a hit and it's for a
photo that's been taken since February twenty seventeen, the date
of Alan's death. But it's a false result. The man
though similar is definitely not Alan. But stranger than that,
Ken says was the lack of photos of Allan online
(21:38):
at all. That false positive is the only photo at
all that the program picked up of the late Alan Metcalf.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
We jump online to discuss this. I ask him if that's.
Speaker 8 (21:49):
Unusual, very unusual, absolutely, you know, someone that has been
spooking a company like this and has been making the
type of claims that he's making. I'm very surprised that
there's not more photos. There should be a bunch of
photos of him online. You know, normally these things end
up in some sort of articles. It's a controversial subject
(22:10):
that he's talking about. So when someone speaks about something controversial,
there's always a lot of people that want to post
about that. So I'm surprised there's not more images of
this guy on the internet. That to me kind of
was a red flag.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
So what do you think that means when there's just
not many pictures of them on the internet.
Speaker 8 (22:28):
Well, one thing it means is that someone may have
changed their identity, their real identity. They could have changed
their name, they could have had a criminal record, and
they could have suddenly sprung up under a brand new identity.
For a person his age to not have any images
on Google, which has been in operation now for over
(22:48):
thirty years, that's unusual. The other reason why somebody's photos
would have disappeared is that they can hire an internet
clean up company and they can get their images removed.
I mean people can do that. It's a red flag,
and I tend to think that there's some reason that
we don't know about why he has either cleaned up
(23:10):
his image on the Internet or why he doesn't have
more published photos. A man of his age and with
his alleged credentials, I'm very surprised that there's nothing more there.
So I think if you dug deeper, I think you
would find that there may be some adverse reason why
he's not there.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
But I have dug deeply into Alan's history and I
don't think the situation Ken's describing applies here. I found
information and photos from when Alan was quite young, not
to mention the numerous YouTube videos he made. The other
option is internet cleanup companies otherwise known as reputation management services.
I do some research and learn they work in a
(23:50):
number of ways. Most of them have a goal of
driving negative search results about their clients off the first
page or two of Google, as very few people will
ever look past that. They do this in a variety
of ways. Some will create new positive blog posts and
articles about you designed to reach the top of Google
and push the negative results further down. Others issued takedown
(24:12):
notices and copyright claims to have content removed from news articles.
There are a number of these services in Australia, and
precisely zero of them are willing to talk to me.
It's hardly surprising given the nature of their jobs. While
Alan's use of one of these services is entirely possible,
I can't prove it one way or the other, and
(24:33):
so I find myself at another dead end. To answer
the question that many have whispered about, is Alan dead?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
I believe he is.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
While there might have been motive and means to disappear,
there are no signs of life, no suspicious trails of money,
no flags on facial recognition searches. His death was, by
all accounts, unsurprising. There's nothing substantial to suggest he managed
to vanish to a level that has been undetectable in
the modern world. This was one of the many rabbit
(25:06):
holes I've gone down in search of the missing millions,
and I'm running out of.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Theories to prove or disprove.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
But there's one more possibility and it involves us megachurches
and ex President Donald Trump. Next episode is my final
chance to find the money before it slips through my fingers.
Speaker 8 (25:29):
No Mighty better take control of this country.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And if the politicians are not going to do it,
I fear that citizens are in the first beginning.
Speaker 6 (25:37):
If America embraces this technology, the American dream of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of personal happiness can be given to
the world to enshrine the American dream forever.
Speaker 7 (25:50):
A lot of the money involved in American politics as
a scam, which is probably a particular to you guys
as well. The very very common thing in American politics
is they find someone who is rather naive. There's a
lot of money, you can believe that if they donate money,
they'll get something, and then the money just gets parketed.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I just kept thinking of myself, there's money vanishing here
for sure.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Thanks for listening. A new episode is coming out weekly.
Wherever you get your podcasts, make sure you subscribe so
you don't miss an episode. Head to news Dot com
dot Au to read more of my reporting on this story.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Do you know more?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Get in touch through our dedicated tip inbox Missing Millions
at news dot com dot au or contact me directly
on Alex dot Turner, Dash Cohen at news dot com dodau,
or look me up on Twitter to get my details.
I'm your host, Alex Turner Cohen. Nina Young is the
executive producer, sound design and editing by Tiffany Dimack. Our
(26:47):
editorial director is Dan Box. Grant McAvaney is our legal advisor,
and Kerry Warren is the editor of news dot com
Today U
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com