“We, the investors, now have closure of the challenging, traumatic and emotional chapter,” said one investor who had been defrauded by a woman she once considered a friend.
Caddick went missing in November 2020 and was later found by a coroner to be dead.
The 49-year-old vanished before dawn on November 12, 2020, one day after Australian Federal Police officers filled her home while carrying out search warrants for ASIC over a $23 million Ponzi scheme she had been operating since 2012.
Her husband, Anthony Koletti, did not report her missing for more than 30 hours.
In February 2021, some of her remains were discovered inside her running shoe on a remote beach 400 kilometres south of Sydney.
When she disappeared, 55 relatives and friends learned she had taken more than $23 million from them while falsely claiming she was investing in shares for them.
One victim, whose extended family had entrusted money to Caddick, said: “She is the con artist of the century. I was dry retching when I found out.”
The money she stole from friends and family paid for an extravagant way of life. That included almost $1 million spent on luxury shoes, clothing, accessories and jewellery. There were also private jets, ski trips to Aspen, expensive cars and her Dover Heights home, which was bought for $6.2 million in 2014.
In 2016, she bought her parents a $2.55 million penthouse. Just months before she vanished, she inspected a waterfront property at Rose Bay and told the agent she wanted to pay $32 million. It eventually sold for $35 million.
Bruce Gleeson, the court-appointed receiver from insolvency firm Jones Partners, said untangling Caddick’s finances became one of the longest and “most challenging” assignments of his career.
The assets he located and sold included Caddick’s teenage son’s sneaker collection worth $17,000, $867,000 raised through the auction of her jewellery and designer items, and $361,000 from the sale of cars.
Her Dover Heights house sold for $9.8 million, while her parents’ Edgecliff penthouse sold for $4 million.
More than $260,000 was also recovered from Christian Dior after an anonymous caller, two years after Caddick’s disappearance, revealed the fashion house was holding a ring and a significant amount of money on her behalf.
The Australian Tax Office also refunded more than $1.7 million in tax Caddick had paid to help maintain the illusion that she was running a legitimate business.
Gleeson said that, while his firm was pleased to have recovered almost 40¢ in the dollar from Caddick’s $23 million fraud, “the emotional and financial toll on those investors, when they realised their savings were anything but safe, was never lost on us throughout this process”.
Before giving anyone money, Gleeson urged investors to make sure the individual or business has an Australian Financial Services Licence.
Some of Caddick’s clients recovered slightly more than 40¢ in the dollar after successful legal action against several auditors of their self-managed super funds who had failed to carry out annual audits checking the validity and accuracy of financial statements.
Gleeson also warned investors to examine documents carefully. For every new client, Caddick created a fake CommSec trading account. Genuine CommSec accounts have eight-digit numbers, but the forged documents she used had only six digits. Each month, she sent clients a report using a cut-and-pasted CommSec logo.
The shares in which she supposedly placed clients’ money never appeared to lose value and instead showed spectacular gains, sometimes as high as 30 per cent.
In May 2023, Deputy State Coroner Elizabeth Ryan found that although the infamous fraudster was dead, how she died and the circumstances of her death would remain unknown because her husband did not give a “frank account” of what happened in the 30 hours before he reported her missing.
The coroner said she accepted evidence from a forensic psychiatrist suggesting that “when faced with the shame of exposure and the potential loss of her family, her friends, her career and her reputation”, Caddick’s narcissistic personality may have led her to take her own life.
