How Facebook helped crack Australia’s biggest insider trading scam

Mr Wealands, who led the 2014 investigation, speaks publicly for the first time as does his AFP colleague, Kylie Standing, and veteran ASIC investigator Raymond Waschl.

“Yes, I felt the pressure. I mean everyone from my boss to their boss or their boss’ boss was very, very interested in the outcome of this investigation,” said Mr Waschl.

“This is probably one of the biggest matters that ASIC has been involved in.”

The Sure Thing charts the formulation of a near-perfect plan by Hill and Kamay during a “two-day piss-up” at a beach house on the Mornington Peninsular and how it sparked the largest joint investigation ever undertaken by ASIC and the AFP.

Hill, who worked at the ABS and passed the highly confidential economic data to Kamay, recorded more than six hours of interviews for The Sure Thing detailing his role in the crime.

He said that despite the economic data being among the most sensitive in the country, he simply wrote the figures on “scraps of paper”, put them in his pocket and took them from the ABS headquarters in Canberra.

Kamay, who was working on NAB’s foreign exchange desk after a stint at Goldman Sachs, traded using the insider information for nine months before being arrested, along with Hill, in May 2014.

In one 25-minute burst of trading, Kamay made $2.54 million. This involved a giant trade which saw him take out $450 million of exposure to the Australian dollar, using leverage of 400 times.

“It was just so over the top and got so out of hand so quickly,” said Joel Murphy, who was head of sales for global derivatives broker Pepperstone at the time and alerted ASIC to the trading.

“We all talked about it in the office … why is he going so hard?” said Mr Murphy. “He just dug himself into such a big hole so quickly.”

Mr Murphy left Pepperstone in 2014 to start his own foreign exchange broking firm, Eightcap.

Kamay went well beyond the plan agreed with Hill, which was to make only $200,000 from the insider information, before paying tax and splitting the profits.

Hill had received just $20,000 for his part in the crime at the time of his arrest, while Kamay paid $2.3 million for an apartment from The Block TV show and was looking at buying a Ferrari.

Using documents not previously released and interviews with all the key players The Sure Thing pieces together the pair’s plan, the police chase, their eventual arrest and time in jail.

Things began to unravel when Mr Murphy and his team at Pepperstone noticed that Kamay was getting it right too often, in a highly volatile and speculative market.

“Initially, there was a lot of small trades from one trader – they were all correct, as in he had a strike rate of 100 per cent,” said Mr Murphy. “Getting it right like that is pretty rare.”

Mr Murphy quickly discovered, via LinkedIn, that Kamay worked on NAB’s foreign exchange desk and initially thought he might be front running client orders. But then Kamay’s pattern of trading showed he was only active around the release of ABS data.

That’s when Mr Murphy turned to Facebook. “So I scan through Lucas’ friends, just to see if anyone had, you know, possibly worked in government,” said Mr Murphy.

“He had 300 friends at that time, so it took me a little while to flick through, but there was one person that … had Canberra in their profile … and they went to uni with him [Kamay].”

That person was Hill. Some further Googling would reveal he worked at the ABS.

After some further investigation Mr Murphy called ASIC, which quickly brought in the AFP. But it would take authorities a further three months to arrest Hill and Kamay, who surprised police with their sophisticated trade craft.

“I didn’t expect them to be so disciplined in their use of covert phones and the like to share that information,” said the AFP’s Mr Wealands.

Listen to the first episode of The Sure Thing below or sign up where you get your podcasts or on Apple, Google, Spotify. Read all the related stories here.