The high-profile private eye kicking in scammers' doors

The Age

08-05-2025

The bikie knew he was there. Ken Gamble had been staking out the property for hours. Dropped in, under cover of darkness, in his 'Yowie suit' – head-to-toe sniper camouflage from his army reserve days – the private detective had crawled through undergrowth, water, mud, all to within metres of the Rebels clubhouse in remote NSW. 'You couldn't see me unless you fell over me,' Gamble says now with a laugh.
But suddenly a bikie was barrelling out of the main house, clutching a hammer, and coming straight for his hiding place.
Gamble froze. If he'd had time to think, he might have told the bikie who exactly had hired him. See, Gamble wasn't there to film evidence of the gang dealing in drugs or guns.
He had crawled through mud and prickly bushes to catch just one bikie out – for insurance fraud.
Today there is an earnestness to Gamble that still doesn't quite see the joke. 'Being of service, helping people, Mum always instilled that in me,' he muses as we sit down to lunch. To Gamble, every job is worthy of busting out the Yowie suit if called for. But what happened next still makes him laugh.
Back then, in 1993, the bikies had got in on the insurance fraud boom, a sweeping epidemic of whiplash and nerve damage that Gamble was increasingly tracing to 'staged accidents'.
This bikie had raked in $1 million claiming that a crash had crippled him, stopping him from riding his beloved motorbike. Gamble still hadn't caught sight of him, after days of surveillance. But, fortunately, the other bikie racing his way, hammer raised, hadn't actually seen Gamble either. The hammer was to put up a sign at the front of their headquarters. 'Rebels Dubbo Chapter Open Day,' it read. 'All welcome.'
Gamble was out of his camouflage and joining the crowds streaming through the front gates in minutes. And when the bikie he had been tracking appeared and hopped onto his bike to show it off for the crowd, Gamble – an early aficionado of the hidden camera 'since Canon came out with a model that could fit in my bum bag' – captured the entire thing.
Welcome to the life of a private investigator. You need patience, grit and luck, Gamble says. You have to be friendly and open, trustworthy, but forgettable. 'Don't be suspicious,' he grins as I consider my best neutral PI face.
Gamble is all things on his list – it's easy to imagine him flipping crooks to rat on their bosses over a beer or spinning a reassuring excuse for being caught up someone's driveway. But he's not forgettable. At least, not any more.
His work on high-profile missing persons cases (such as that of Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez) and now chasing scammers out of cyberspace to their office doors has brought the private eye firmly into the public eye – not to mention his enthusiasm for kicking in those doors on camera. Today he's Australia's best-known freelance detective, with a reputation for hunting the crooks police have given up chasing.
Cops and crims alike say Gamble is the last man you'd want on your tail. He spent years cultivating sources in Egypt until he reunited a kidnapped Australian girl with her mother, unravelled the fraud empire of a Beijing Olympics ticket scammer, and hunted down then-fugitive conman Peter Foster to a Port Douglas beach (even helpfully shooting drone footage of Foster's made-for-TV arrest).
He was contracted by Paramount Pictures to bust the pirate rings illegally downloading its movies, and once spent days tailing a suspect across time zones and connecting flights. ('Follow a target's shoes, not their face,' he says. 'If you accidentally make eye contact, it's all over.')
Today, Gamble teams up with police around the world to raid the 'normal-looking offices' running some of the biggest online scams that target Australians.
They're known as boiler rooms – where fraud 'sales crews' trick unsuspecting investors into handing over their cash – but their operations sprawl across multiple departments, from HR to IT. They have sales targets, managers and pictures of family on their desks.
And the bikies have got in on this racket too, says Gamble. He's caught 'patched bikies cold-calling [investors]' in Gold Coast boiler rooms, all reading diligently from scripts.
He laughs as he describes the confusion on scammers' faces whenever he appears through the swarm of police on those raids, sometimes with a film crew at his shoulder, usually still in his polo shirt and bum bag. 'They must be thinking, 'Who the hell is this guy?' It does feel like being in a James Bond movie,' he says.
'But I wanted to show it was possible to catch them. Everyone says, 'The money's gone – it's offshore, bad luck.' The scammers are good, and our cops underestimate them, but they're not untouchable.
'Australia should be going after this money. It's billions. And getting it back for someone who's lost everything … It can restore a whole life.'
Up close, the famous Gamble focus is strangely endearing. He rattles off dates and names with precision, not, he says, because he has an extraordinary memory, but because 'details are everything'. And you never know what clue might become the break in a case. (Or which bikie might invite you into their clubhouse.)
Before we even glance at the menu, we're comparing notes on a crook it turns out we've both been investigating. Different name, same face. 'See?'
Lunch today is at Melbourne's bustling Sherlock Holmes Inn – because it's named for literature's most famous 'consulting detective' and Gamble made the mistake of insisting I pick the venue.
But it turns out the Sherlock in front of me really does have a Watson: his business partner and fellow private eye Allan Watson, who he's been investigating crooks with for more than 30 years, including today at their financial fraud investigation agency IFW Global.
This grand old pub is fitting for another reason too – Gamble grew up in a pub. His family took over the Gregory Downs Hotel in Mount Isa ('exactly in the middle of nowhere') when he was 12. His first year of high school was run out of that pub, over radio waves, listening to the tinny voice of Miss Reid and four other kids scattered hundreds of kilometres across the cattle stations while his parents shooed away the local drunks from his study corner.
Not for long, though. It was a teenage Ken's job to drive those drunks back out to their stations at the end of the night – a job he says set him up well for his first serious interest: boxing.
There are plenty of press clippings to thumb through of a young, sweaty Gamble, boxing glove in the air and medal around his neck. 'My thing was, soon as that bell dinged, I'd race in on attack, catch them off guard,' he says.
He had grown up around violence, watching his dad leap across the bar to throw out troublemakers, 'getting into fights myself'. And he was fit from long stretches working on cattle stations from the age of 12, mustering and branding cows, breaking in horses.
'But boxing was a brutal sport,' he says.
Recalling a champion title fight he won at 15 in 1982, he sighs. 'The other guy bled a lot.'
As the food arrives (steak for me and a succulent roast for Gamble), he talks of his time working as an auxiliary firefighter, and later as an actor (he even played a detective on Water Rats in 2000).
But it was the stories of his great uncle Ray, a private eye in the 1960s, which really caught Gamble's interest. 'He'd hand out 'blue slips' for infidelity, leap through windows to photograph people in the act,' he laughs.
By the time Gamble joined Ray's old private detective agency, Webster's, in 1988, regulations had tightened. Surveillance required creativity, tricks – even some acting – to lure a subject outside under the lens of a camera. Gamble would pretend to be a confused tradie arriving to rip up a driveway ('Whoops, wrong house!') or a neighbour's friend who had accidentally dropped something in the wrong letterbox. ('Could you just come out and get it for me?')
Things could go wrong. He stumbled across secret marijuana plantations, was shot at and attacked. Once, while he was trying to keep a low profile monitoring his target at a bingo night, his trusty hidden camera started making alarming creaking noises. Then, even worse, 'I actually won bingo.'
But Gamble enjoyed the more dangerous, remote surveillance jobs. It reminded him of his army reserve training and camping with his dad ('a real bushman'), those summers spent herding cattle and chasing rainstorms.
'They would call me Eddie the Emu because I'd run into the trees and disappear,' he says. 'I ended up metres away from [mafia boss ] Francesco Barbaro on his own land.'
He went undercover too, for months at a time, befriending targets to gather intelligence. But Gamble found the betrayal too hard. 'I didn't want to make enemies like that then,' he says. 'These days, I don't care about making enemies. The scammers know I'm after them. But it's upfront.'
So, is Peter Foster his Moriarty, his chief nemesis? The investigator's work exposing Foster's weight loss and sports betting scams has led to at least three of Foster's many high-profile arrests. Gamble ticks them off on one hand. ('Crash-tackled. Fell into barbed wire. Crash-tackled on the beach...') The self- described 'international man of mischief' is now out on bail, fighting more fraud charges.
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'He's not smart enough [to be Moriarty],' Gamble decides. 'But he is confident. He's a real confidence trickster. He knows how to play the system, get a better deal.
'Still, someone always talks.'
Over long lunches like this, Gamble has gleaned a career's worth of intelligence and then some – including, more than once, a warning his own life was in danger.
It turns out that the most useful skill of all for a private detective might just be being more fun to have a beer with, being someone you want to help out, someone you trust – at least more than your neighbourhood crime boss.
Crooks are no match for a kind country boy? Gamble laughs: 'Thanks, Mum!'