Erin Patterson found guilty of murdering three guests with deadly mushroom lunch
The jury has reached a verdict in Erin Patterson's murder trial, finding her guilty of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. Patterson had pleaded not guilty to murdering three relatives and attempting to murder another by serving them Beef Wellingtons containing death cap mushrooms during a lunch at her home at Leongatha in regional Victoria in July 2023. Patterson's parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson both died after the lunch, along with Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson. Heather's husband Ian Wilkinson survived after spending weeks in hospital. The trial was held in the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in the regional Victorian town of Morwell. Reporter: Jarrod Whittaker (Sale)
Northern Territory Coroner Elisabeth Armitage has delivered her findings in a long-running inquest into the fatal police shooting of 19-year-old Warlpiri-Luritja man Kumanjayi Walker during an arrest in Yuendumu in 2019. Judge Armitage found former constable Zachary Rolfe, who fired the fatal shots, "was racist", and that she could not exclude the possibility that those attitudes "were a contributing cause of Kumanjayi's death". The NT Police Force says it will "carefully consider" Judge Armitage's 32 recommendations and more than 600 pages of findings.Reporter: Carly Williams in Yuendumu
A former underground miner is suing Anglo Coal for more than $1 million in damages following separate explosions at Grosvenor Coal Mine. The 35-year-old is suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from multiple incidents. Anglo American says the health, safety and wellbeing of workers is top priority and it is committed to ensuring a safe working environment. Reporter: Ellie Will cox (Rockhampton)
Gunlom Falls, one of Kakadu National Park's most popular sites, reopened today, giving visitors access for the first time in six years. The waterfall was closed in 2019 due to a dispute between traditional owners and Parks Australia over damage to a sacred Aboriginal men's site. Reporter: James Elton (Katherine)
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ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Liquidator probes transfer of Queensland government funds to bank account of Cryptoloc Holdings founder Jamie Wilson
Liquidators are probing how money for a $15 million Queensland government project was transferred from the contract-winning cybersecurity company to its founder's bank account within 24 hours of the funds arriving. The funds transfer to Cryptoloc Holdings founder Jamie Wilson, who once wooed the state's top politicians and pop stars, is under investigation as a potential "fraudulent" transaction, according to a liquidator's report. The move is the latest shock from a disastrous cybersecurity tender won just before last year's state election by Cryptoloc Holdings. The government contract dissolved within months and the state has pursued $1.5 million paid in an initial sum. The ABC can also reveal Mr Wilson has just filed for personal bankruptcy. He declared having repaid $1 million to a family member in the months before his company failed, but only having $120 in cash on him now. Mr Wilson's entities donated more than $320,000 to both sides of politics over four years. He was a networker who was repeatedly nominated for the LNP Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner's businessperson of the year award and scored face time with then-Labor deputy premier Steven Miles. The 45-year-old accountant turned tech entrepreneur rubbed shoulders with celebrities, including pop star Ronan Keating at company-sponsored parties and appeared on video podcasts with influencers. His Cryptoloc Holdings won a tender last September to provide a $15 million cybersecurity program, hailed by the then-Labor government as helping "protect Queensland's small businesses". But after an ABC investigation in November uncovered financial problems, the state government alleged it could not get sufficient answers from Cryptoloc Holdings and tipped it into liquidation. Now liquidator Nick Combis of Vincents has zeroed in on the state funds. Cryptoloc Holdings "never had any assets of significance until the funds it received … from the Queensland state government", his report said. Creditors seek $2.4 million, including $1.51 million for the state and $44,000 for a subcontractor. "My investigations have revealed several uncommercial transactions, including the removal of funds from the company's bank account and paid directly to the director's bank account within twenty-four hours of funds being received from the Queensland state government," Mr Combis wrote. He noted management accounts had recorded expenses last year of $1.55 million and these were "amounts transferred primarily from the company's account to the director's bank account (I have traced) which I consider to be voidable and or fraudulent transactions". Mr Combis wrote Mr Wilson has "indicated that he has no assets [to] repay the funds". Mr Wilson has not answered ABC requests for comment. But in an email filed in earlier state litigation, Mr Wilson had maintained money advanced by the government had been spent on the cybersecurity program and his company was working to "successfully deliver" the project. His own records for bankruptcy, filed last month, said he is living rent-free with family. He listed $4.6 million in debts, including $1 million owed to the Australian Taxation Office, $2.62 million to Cryptoloc Holdings, $260,000 to two businessmen and $600,000 to a family member. That family member received $1 million in October for a personal loan repayment, the filings state. They also said Mr Wilson paid former conservative politician Santo Santoro, a lobbyist for Mr Wilson's business, $150,000 in the month before state money flowed. Mr Wilson wrote that the reason for the payment was "debt collector". Mr Wilson wrote another of his failed companies, Your Digital File (Aust), owed him $1 million for a business loan. He also had $110,312 in superannuation, but only $120 in cash. The rapid contract failure has raised questions about tendering — but bureaucrats have refused to hand over more than 180 pages of related documents the ABC has sought via right to information laws. Mr Wilson's Cryptoloc Technology paid $23,040 for Labor events a few months before the contract was awarded, including a Queensland Labor Business Roundtable membership, and political lunches hosted by then-premier Steven Miles and Energy Minister Mick de Brenni. A Queensland Labor spokesman said Cryptoloc donations did not influence the tender process, which the department ran independently. Neither Mr Miles, Mr de Brenni or then small business minister Lance McCallum, who announced Cryptoloc's win in September, intervened in the tenders, the spokesman said. A spokesman for Steve Minnikin, minister for customer services and open data in the new LNP administration, said an audit underway into the cybersecurity tender "aims to identify potential process improvements".
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Meet the pensioner taking NAB to Supreme Court over $1,338 in fraudulent transactions
It was a cool, grey spring morning in 2022 when Ian Williams woke up and discovered two transactions on his account he did not make. "I was sitting on the toilet and checking through my bank account, as you do," he said. One was for $515, the other was $823. They had been made a few days earlier at a Coles supermarket in Bundoora, about 150 kilometres from his regional Victorian home in Bendigo. He called the bank and was told to wait while staff investigated. Two hours later, he said, a customer service representative from uBank, a subsidiary of National Australia Bank (NAB), called him back and said, according to the bank's payment data, the transactions had been made using Williams's Google Pay account. "They said that I was guilty, I was responsible. I was personally at Coles to do the transactions with my phone and my thumbprint." That was an accusation he would never let go. Two and half years later, Williams was outside the Supreme Court in Melbourne. He'd just learnt he could be in line to win more than $300 million in his case against the bank over the fraud. After months of scrolling through codes, acts, and case law to represent himself in the most David and Goliath of cases, the bank hadn't shown up at court, and a judge had found in his favour. All that had to be decided was how much money he'd get for his trouble. Then, just as the scales were starting to tip his way, the bank's legal team came storming in. When NAB told Williams he was responsible for the missing $1,338 on that cool spring morning back in 2022, he wasted little time trying to prove them wrong. His maps app showed he never left Bendigo, his sleep app indicated he was asleep close to the time the transactions went through. He had call and text logs to prove a friend of his was headed over for a cuppa that morning. When that wasn't enough, he visited his local police station, filled out a fraud pack, made a statement, and had an officer sign off that he had witnessed the map data was from Williams's phone. He sent his police statement to the bank, believing it would finally clear up any misunderstanding. When that didn't work, he went to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA). By now, the police had viewed and collected the CCTV from the supermarket. Williams wasn't provided a copy of the tape, but he was given a description in an email from police. "It looks like two young males who look nothing like you have somehow been able to create copies of your (and likely others) credit card details on phone handsets to buy gift cards," the email read. The evidence showed Williams wasn't the one using his phone to make those transactions at a supermarket 150km away from his home. Then, came the answer most scam victims desperately hope for. The bank would return the $1,338, in full. But, there was a catch. He would need to sign a non-disclosure agreement and, crucially, agree that the payment did not mean the bank was taking responsibility for the missing funds. Williams was ropeable. "Now they can pay me some compensation. I want a letter of apology and a letter of acknowledgement that they're at fault, not me." He told the bank the reason for his refusal. Five months later, they made him another offer: how about $1,500 as a "full and final settlement"? Williams would have to agree not to take legal action. The offer would expire in two weeks. Again, he said no. "It's the principle of the thing. I just won't wear being called a liar. "I had to fight for myself all my life and this sort of injustice, where common people are being trampled … it's just getting worse and worse. "I'm a stubborn old turd, and I will not give up." At 73 years old, Williams was no stranger to new and unfamiliar environments. He ran away from home at 15, he said, hitchhiking his way around the country, sleeping in the hollows of trees, under bridges, and squatting in abandoned terraced houses. "A 12-by-eight piece of black plastic is the best thing I've ever had," he said. The decades of his life were filled with a diverse range of jobs: stunt man, actor, prawn trawler fisherman. He ran his own business in security investigating stock shrinkage, bought a television tower in rural Victoria for $1, which he still owns. He learnt how to fly planes, play the acoustic guitar, and two years ago walked for 18 days straight as part of the Long Walk from Melbourne to Canberra. One of his biggest motivations to take on a corporate giant was to donate any money he won to Indigenous health charities. And so, for the past year, filled with the drive of a man who flourishes in the face of something new, Williams began most nights, about 8pm, scrolling through dozens of legal databases and dry legislation. He read the stories of those who've lost hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars to fraud and scams, and wrote and rewrote an argument to take to court, often huddled into his corner desk until the sun came up. "I might not go to bed until eight or nine o'clock the next morning," he said. He visited legal aid, the law institute, and universities, had meetings with civil lawyers who said they might be able to take on his case pro bono, but who, in the end, gave him advice about where to secure a personal loan to pay their fees. "Nobody would take it on. Maybe because it's a bank and they're too big to fight?" he said. So, about 18 months after the bank's final offer, on a mild summer day in December 2024, Williams caught the train down to Melbourne with his friend Richard Sugden, to the headquarters of NAB. There, armed with a stack of papers, he sat down with a woman from the bank called Sarah and took her through his 14-page writ that outlined he was seeking $379 million in exemplary damages. Williams had calculated that $1,338 was about 5.5 per cent of his annual pension. And $379.05 million was 5.5 per cent of NAB's 2022 profit after tax. "Things need to be proportionate," he said. In those documents, Williams claimed the bank: Williams claimed the reason he was suing for the vast amount of $380 million was because he believed NAB's demonstrated "a systemic abuse of power", knowledge of his vulnerability, "and deliberate disregard for fair dealing". The bank had about four weeks to respond. Williams didn't spend much time wondering how his Google Pay card got onto someone else's phone. He assumed he'd been hacked, and that the bank should have caught it. But on the other side of the world, Dutch cyber expert Eward Driehuis, was digging into the conundrum: how could a digital wallet be used in two places at once? Why were stolen digital cards suddenly turning up in supermarkets across Europe? Since 2017, Driehuis, supported by a team of 70, has worked with law enforcement and banks across the globe, helping them with digital scams. Last year, he got a call from a bank concerned its customers "seemed to teleport". It didn't take long for Driehuis and his team to figure out that criminals had created an enterprise out of stealing card details, adding a stack of them to digital wallets on burner phones. He said he saw photographs from authorities in Europe showing mobile phones side-by-side in a warehouse with the screens open to the phone wallet. "[It] was truly impressive. Each wallet [was] holding multiple stolen cards, ready to sell. And all those phones had stickers on them with Chinese handwriting." Here's how Driehuis says it works: The victim puts their credit card details into a scam site, thinking they're making a purchase. They are then asked for their phone number so they can be sent a text with a one-time password to confirm the purchase. But the scammer has actually registered those card details to be added to a phone's digital wallet, and that one-time password text message is from Google or Apple, asking the victim to authorise the new registration. It could be stopped if victims read the entire text message, but these days, few do, Driehuis said. "Some operating systems, including iOS, which is all the Apple phones, they just automatically read those codes and use them. Some phones don't even show those codes." He dubbed the fraud scam "ghost tapping" and gave a presentation on it earlier this year in Melbourne to Australia's biggest banks. Williams did receive text messages a few days before the fraudulent transaction went through, with a passcode for him to confirm he wanted to add his card to a new Google Pay account. But he said he doesn't remember receiving the texts. It's unclear how the scammer who added his card to a digital wallet managed to get that code. He said even if he did unwittingly give the scammer authorisation to add his card, he still believes the bank should have picked up that something wasn't right. It's now in the hands of a judge to decide if he's right. Ghost tapping is a problem that was on the cusp of being addressed by the United States when, late last year, the consumer watchdog agency the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), started to take control of Google Pay to find out how big of a problem fraud, scams and a lack of security was at the company. The CFPB could do this under its "supervisory authority" powers, allowing it to examine the company's transaction data, complaint responses and its anti-fraud systems. The department had received hundreds of complaints about money being taken via Google Wallet accounts, in circumstances very similar to Williams's. But there was considerable pushback, including Google making an application to sue the CFPB. But the death knell was President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which reversed the supervisory authority and significantly defunded the CFPB. Erin Witte, a consumer protection lawyer and policymaker at the Consumer Federation of America, said the tech company was effectively given a "free pass". She said what happened to Williams was an example of something the CFPB could have monitored. "How often did this happen? How often did Google ignore this … location discrepancy?" While investigators in Europe were looking at warehouses full of burner phones and the US was busy defunding consumer protection, Williams was preparing for court. On a mild morning in May, he slid on a black jacket he bought from a second-hand store the week before, checked his tie, zipped a bulging red folder of documents into a small suitcase and waited for his friend to take him to the train station. They arrived outside the Supreme Court a little before 1pm. NAB had made an application for the default judgement that found in Williams's favour to be set aside. The bank said it missed its deadline because it lost the paperwork served by Williams. It argued the default judgement had been "snapped on"; a legal term meaning Williams applied for it too quickly. It meant Williams and the bank would go head-to-head, in the flesh, for the first time. The hearing took a few hours, and ultimately, the bank succeeded in having the judgement reversed. "Now it goes back to where I was originally going to be, taking them to court and fighting it all the way through the court, and trying to make that as public and as embarrassing for the bank as I can," Williams said. Losing the case could mean he'll be ordered to pay the bank's costs, which Williams said could bankrupt him. But he was glad the bank had shown up. "My whole thing with running this through the courts is to make it very, very public." Later that afternoon, sitting on the train back to Bendigo, Williams talked about the case with Sugden and was overheard by other passengers. "I met three people who had been scammed or had fraudulent activity on their accounts. One was $10,000, and they didn't fight it. They just thought it was too hard." Williams said his fight is not about a payout (though he admits it would be nice to buy a house), but about making an example out of a corporate behemoth that he believes won't admit it got it wrong. "I'm the first [scam victim] that I can find that's actually thought it's worth doing this because people were just getting ripped off all the time, every single day." In a statement, NAB said it took "its commitment to scam prevention extremely seriously" and had made multiple attempts to help Williams. "[We] are disappointed that the matter has progressed to the Supreme Court. As this issue is now subject to legal proceedings, we are unable to provide further comment," NAB said. NAB has applied to have the matter struck off, with a hearing scheduled for later in the year.
News.com.au
2 hours ago
- News.com.au
What is the biggest Aussie sports scandal of the 21st century?
From best mates falling out to the 'blackest day'. Booing to 'don't blush, baby'. Ben Cousins to Cameron Bancroft. For every Sir Donald Bradman, Cathy Freeman, Oarsome Foursome or Phar Lap, sadly there are also a number of athletes, teams or moments that have tarnished the green and gold's generally strong international sporting reputation. Our 25@25 series will finally put to bed the debates you've been having at the pub and around dinner tables for years – and some that are just too much fun not to include. Racism, infidelity, quitting on your teammates or perhaps the sporting issue many Aussies struggle to reconcile with more than any other – performance enhancing drugs – are just some of the inescapable scourges we've been forced to face. Australian sport has had some horror blights since the turn of the century, but what is the worst? We'll let you decide the order, but these are our biggest sports scandals of the past 25 years. Laydown Sally In a gold-laden 2004 Athens Olympics for Australia, one of the biggest stories involved a team that effectively failed to finish. Sally Robbins famously quit rowing with about 400m remaining in the women's eights final when the Aussie team was in medal contention. They ultimately finished last, about 10 seconds behind second-last Germany, and Robbins' name was etched in history. Melbourne Storm salary cap Emerging from the Super League wars of the late 1990s, the Storm quickly became one of Australia's most successful clubs. That all came crashing down on April 22, 2010, when massive salary cap breaches over a five-year period were made public. It led to the stripping of two premierships and a huge fine, among other penalties. Adam Goodes racism This is a difficult incident to summarise in a couple of sentences. One of the key events came in 2013 when a young girl called Goodes an 'ape' during an AFL game. While Goodes repeatedly said the young girl should not be blamed for the incident, he began to get booed at games across the country and the Swans legend eventually retired and subsequently largely withdrew himself from the footy public. Shane Warne drugs On the eve of the 2003 One-Day Cricket World Cup, a bombshell report swept Australia that Shane Warne had tested positive to an illegal drug. Warne had taken a diuretic that can be used as a masking agent for steroids, claiming it had been given to him by his mother to help hide a double chin. He was handed a one-year ban from the sport and Ricky Ponting's team still managed to win the tournament. Wayne Carey cheating In another where-were-you moment, the North Melbourne captain fronted a media conference in 2002 to admit to an affair with Kelli Stevens, the wife of teammate Anthony Stevens, after she was seen following Carey into a bathroom at Glenn Archer's house. Soap opera writers would be proud if they came up with that one. Sandpaper This one might take some beating and involves, of course, the use of sandpaper to attempt to manipulate the cricket ball during Australia's 2018 tour of South Africa. Steve Smith, David Warner and Cam Bancroft all copped bans and, in some ways, Aussie cricket is still trying to live it all down. Essendon supplements saga On February 7, 2013, the 'blackest day' in Australian sport dropped when the Australian Crime Commission released a report called 'Organised Crime and Drugs in Sport'. The scandal involved the use of 'peptides', the Cronulla Sharks were also implicated and sports scientist Stephen Dank became a household name. Raygun Similar to the Lay Down Sally affair, the performance of Rachael Gunn when breakdancing made its Games debut in Paris last year sadly overshadowed many of Australia's brilliant Olympic efforts. Legendary memes, court battles over stage shows, Halloween costumes, an Australian Story episode – this saga had it all and stayed in the news for months. West Coast Eagles drugs Roughly 20 years ago, West Coast and the Sydney Swans fought out one of the great rivalries in modern AFL history. Sadly around the same time, the Eagles began getting implicated in a series of off-field dramas. Ben Cousins was the sad poster boy of the club's issues with illicit drugs, facing repeated sanctions before he was sacked in late 2007. Don't blush baby In early January 2016, sports presenter Mel McLaughlin interviewed West Indies superstar Chris Gayle live in a Big Bash match in Hobart. What transpired shocked everyone looking on. The batsman did his best to proposition the reporter, complimenting her eyes, stating 'we can have a drink later' and then adding 'don't blush baby'. It was a horrendous incident made even worse by Channel 10 somehow deciding to tweet the interview with the hashtag 'smooth' before it was deleted. Apologies soon flew but it was too little, too late in a black eye for Gayle, the sport and the broadcaster.
