A Mysterious Foot, Skip Tracing 101, Catch Me If You Can, Been In A Vehicle Accident?,

In this episode we cover topics such as:-

1- The vanishing of Melissa Caddick;

2- Skip Tracing, What? Why? How?;

3- A real life Skip Tracing story;

4- Top 5 Tips When In A Vehicle Accident;

Got a question for our podcast or do you need to contact Simon and the Down Under Investigations team? Simply email info@downunderinvestigations.com or call 1300849007 or check out www.downunderinvestigations.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Down Under Investigations the Truth. Our host Simon, has over 20 years experience in the private investigation industry and he leads the team at down under investigations who pride themselves on their professionalism, integrity, and ability to get results. This podcast will open up the world of private investigations discussing real life cases, latest news, surveillance, and skip tracing techniques, legal issues and support. Let's jump in and join Simon. Now,

Speaker 2: 0:34

There is an absolutely fascinating case currently in Australia surrounding the mysterious disappearance of a Melissa Caddick. Two years have passed since the disappearance of the fraudster and there's still many unanswered questions regarding her case. Caddick went missing from her Sydney home in the eastern suburbs In November, 2020, she disappeared from her home just a day after she was raided by corporate regulator and police. Here is her last recording where she was interviewed by Constable Amanda Griffin regarding a search of her property by police.

Speaker 3: 1:07

This is a record of conversation between Constable Amelia Griffin and Melissa Caddick resumed. Do you agree the time is now 6:18 PM Yes. So the date is the 11th of November, 2020. It's a Wednesday. Uh, so the search of the premises is now complete. Uh, during the search warrant process, please secured a number of items to be either seized or moved. Those items have been packaged and labeled and recorded on property seizure or movement records. So do you agree that FA feels still, who was a property officer went through um, the property seizure and movement records and showed you the items that they correspond to? Yes. Yep. Do you agree that is all the property that police are taking and that there is no other property not listed on the property seizure or movement records? Yes. Um, and do you also agree that you signed the property seizure records? Yes. Okay, and I provided you with a copy of those? Yes. Okay. So do you have any comments about the way the search warrant was conducted? No. Um, before we leave the premises, is there anything further you wish to say? No. No. Okay. So do you agree the time is now 6:19 PM on the 11th of November, 2020? Yes. Okay. So this record of conversation is now concluded.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Three months after Caddick disappeared, her foot was found washed up on Boarder Beach in New South Wales. It was encompassed by a shoe, which was an Ass's model, and that was discovered at the end of February in 2021. This location of the discovery was 400 kilometers south of her multimillion dollar mansion in Sydney's Dover Heights. And this prompted some speculation that Caddick 49 had faked her own death by amputating her foot and fled the country. Caddick was accused of running a multimillion dollar fraud scheme. She was reportedly able to take advantage of her friends and family's investments to the amount of 20 to 30 million. An inquest held earlier this month was focused on CAD's final movements. It also examined the police investigation of her husband, Anthony Colletti. One of the officers who attended the hearing said that the husband's unusual behavior was the reason for the police to suspect foul play. According to Louise Coleman counsel assisting the coroner, the police officers who were involved in the investigation into CAD's disappearance believed that Colletti played a part in her disappearance. The court was also told that Colletti did not provide a statement to the police about his wife's disappearance until November 13, more than 24 hours after she went missing. Ms. Coleman said it is plain from the brief of evidence that as early as November 13th, 2020, each of the three police officers that had attended Colette's home that day and had spoken with the witness held concerns regarding the accounts provided by Mr. Colletti and suspected that he might have been involved in some way in Ms. CAD's disappearance. In a statement released in July, 2021, Sergeant Trent Riley stated that he believed that Mr. Colletti knew where Caddick was. He states that Mr. Colletti has told him several times that his story had changed multiple occasions and that he had made strange and unusual comments about different aspects of his version. Ms. Coleman said, regardless, any suggestion that Mr. Colletti might have anything to do with the disappearance was quickly ruled out. During the investigation, Detective Sergeant Michael Kanu led the team for a brief period in November, 2020. During his time with the investigation, Detective Sergeant Kanu said that he had considered three different scenarios regarding CAD's disappearance. These included her being killed by Mr. Colletti or that Ms. Caddick committed suicide or that she had already vanished. He ruled out the theory that Mr. Colletti, who was a hairdresser in part-time, DJ was involved in her vanishing. Sergeant Kanu said it was not a viable proposition in his mind that she was killed by Mr. Colletti. He went on to say that there was no evidence in the house of any struggle or violence, and he was mindful that Ms. CAD's son was also present at the time she left. Interestingly, CAD's husband, Mr. Colletti, has not been charged with any crimes related to her disappearance. Such an interesting story, an ongoing, uh, investigation. What happened to Melissa Caddick? Where is she now? Is she deceased or has she moved to another country or area? Maybe in the future we'll find out and be able to give you an update. We'll keep watching this story. We've got an email here from Chris. Chris writes, Hey Simon, love the podcast. Thanks very much. Keep up the great work. We certainly will. A quick question for you. You have mentioned skip tracing a bit. Can you explain what this is and how it affects your work? We sure can. Chris skip Tracing is basically the process of locating a missing person. People go missing for a variety of reasons, whether that's people who have just walked away from their house or from their family or their life. There's also missing people in regards to a debt where someone may owe a debt so they deliberately choose to go missing. There's other, other situations where someone needs to be located because the information that the courts might have or the lawyers might have is incomplete. They might have part of an address, they might have an old address, an old phone number, obsolete details that are not current. So that's where skip tracing comes into it. It's basically a term that's used in our industry to simply explain the locating of a missing person. So how do we skip trace? There's many different avenues we take when we skip trace someone. A lot of it comes down to the first information that we get from a client. So we use that information. What we try and do is make sure we've got as much information as possible from the client, whether it's old phone numbers, old addresses, old email addresses, spouse details, employment details, business details, those sorts of things. They can all assist. When we're skip tracing someone, then what we do is we use that information and we enter it into a whole series of databases and searches that we undertake. From that information, we can expand the search. So we will find family members, we'll find friends, we'll correct maybe the spelling of the names. Often we find that the address is simply wrong, that the address is simply the wrong street number, but it's the right street. So we'll correct that. Or sometimes a skip trace will blow out a little bit where we have to go further and above and beyond to find someone. So we will find, find family members, we will find friends, we will find siblings, we will find all sorts of people who will be able to point us in the right direction. So some skip tracing is done discreetly behind the scenes. Others where maybe it's a will and they're actually, they need to be contacted so that they can have access to the proceeds of a will. Where we're a bit more obvious with what we are doing and we will disclose what we're doing straight away, straight up and be very clear when we're speaking to a person to obtain someone else's information. But when we're doing it behind the scenes, maybe for someone who we know is evasive or done a runner deliberately, we have to be very discreet in what we do. So the phone calls that we make, the contact that we make is often not 100% honest or truthful with what we're trying to say. But that's all part of our job. That's what we do when we're trying to obtain information. So we do database searches, we make phone calls, field visits, and a whole series of other searches in order to try and locate someone. My personal theory is I think to myself, who has this information? Who knows where this person is living or working or where we can get in contact with them? Who's the person that knows and on what circumstances would that person tell me the information? And that's how we come up with our discreet inquiries. We find out the information from a contact from maybe a source or through these database searches. Some of these database searches are brilliant. They give us so much information about a person. You'll see in a previous podcast we did top five websites that have totally free for you to do searches for you to find someone. But we've got plenty more. We've got dozens and dozens of different ways and avenues and means of finding someone. The question sometimes asked, How long does it take to find someone? Well, that always depends on a few factors. One, depending on the information that we first obtain from the client, the better the information, the more the information. Uh, that definitely assists. Secondly, is the person being hidden deliberately? Are they being evasive? Do they not want to be found? Have they deliberately hidden information not registered? Certain things that we can search for in order to not be found? We'll always find them guaranteed. We'll always find someone, but sometimes it just takes a little bit longer and we have to be a little bit more patient. We have to be a little bit more vigilant. And one day we do get the results. We've had skip traces that have gone on sometimes for over a year. And we don't work the case every single day, but every few weeks, every few days, maybe every few months we'll run the same searches again. And then we'll find a little bit more information and a little bit more and a little bit more, which will lead us to the person. So if you're out there and you are saying, Hey, you'll never find me. Yeah, well we've heard that before and we've found the person and we've served them with papers and they've ended up in court whether they want to or not. You can run, but you can't hide<laugh>. So thanks very much, Chris, for your question. That's a great question. That's our question of the month. Chris. We've got a prize coming out your way worth over a hundred dollars and we just wanted to say thank you and uh, stay tuned for more details on our question of the month.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Got a question for Simon and down under investigations, we are running a questions of the month competition. If your question gets answered by Simon, we will send you a prize valued at a hundred dollars. To ask your question, simply use the contact page on our website@www.downunderinvestigations.com or email podcasts@downunderinvestigations.com.

Speaker 2: 11:39

One of my favorite skip traces that we ever did was basically one of those ones where it's a catch me if you can. This gentleman was wanted by many people. He had debt running up everywhere. He'd been bankrupt once or twice. He didn't know his kids, his family didn't know where he was. And he'd done a runner. We made contact with him over the phone discreetly, but straightaway he was onto it. He knew what was going on because no one had his number. We somehow, we managed to find it, gave him a call and he basically said, No, you'll never find me. You'll never get me to the effect of, catch me if you can. So we set about trying to locate this gentleman. We did find he had very limited databases containing his information. Most of it was old, most of it was obsolete. We did find one social media profile. We did find one photo that was viewable online and in this photo was a photo of him. So we knew what he looked like and he was leaning against a certain type of car. We believe the car was his. So that gave us a little bit more, little bit more information about this gentleman. We did a few other searches, worked out that he was going by an alias. Found information about this alias, the circles that this alias was associated with and the area of the state that he was currently residing in. So we had a picture of him. We had a vehicle and we had a discreet area, a very rural area to go and search. So we hit the road and we went there, a colleague and myself. We drove street after street for a couple of hours and drove and drove up and down each street looking down each driveway looking for this vehicle. That was gonna be the way we could locate this gentleman. And then we found the vehicle parked in the driveway of a certain property. This property was on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. He had really tried to hide from society and from the world, but we'd found him, drove up, parked across, went to his door. We had papers, we were prepared. We knew what we were doing. We knew what we had to serve him with. Went to the door straightaway. He said, No, it's not me. I dunno who you're looking for. I dunno that person. So we showed him his photo, said, This is you. You've been served handling the papers. We rang our clients straightaway cuz our client was owed money by this person, but they'd also been a very large element of fraud involved. Our client wanted him reported to the police because this was the one and only opportunity to get him. So he rang the police and they came, they attended, they actually arrested him, took him down to the station for questioning, and our client got the result. I don't know if they ever got their money, but they definitely got to take them to court. They got to do the right thing. And this person was found. He said, Catch me if you can. And we certainly did. Approximately$27 billion worth of damage is done to vehicles in car accidents across Australia each year. We work on a lot of cases where a, a driver has been involved in an accident, but they've failed to obtain the required information or they've got stressed or confused at the scene of an accident and they've failed to get what they need. Well acts a certain way at an accident scene. So here's our top five to-do list at the scene of an accident. Well, our number one is a do not, do not admit fault. Be careful how you interact with other drivers. If you admit fault, you immediately place all blame and costs on yourself, even if it seems obvious or you feel embarrassed or threatened. Don't say I'm sorry or it's my fault. We've seen accidents where the circumstances may appear one way, but there's other factors which the companies that pay out in in these circumstances look at and even the law looks at to make it maybe not your fault, you may not have seen something. So admitting fault puts all the blame and costs on you. So avoid saying sorry and avoid admitting fault at the scene of an accident. Always wait for the matter to be investigated by your legal representative. First. Number two, exchange information with the other driver. Make sure you get their full name, address, contact number, insurance information, vehicle registration, and driver's license number. This information is essential. We're making a proper claim against another driver. It's always handy to take a photo of their license so you get correct spelling, you get the correct address. And remember to turn that license over just in case they have changed address. And what we're talking about taking photos. Point three is take lots of photos, take video, take photos of the damage to both vehicles, take photos of the road surface, take photos of the surrounding area to get the weather, to get the conditions, photos of the vehicle number plates, even photographs of the driver's license when they permit you to remember, these photographs enable you, your legal representative to fully investigate the matter with accurate information and ensure that your rights are protected. Number four, identify and contact any witnesses. Speak with any witnesses who may have seen the accident and obtain their contact information. Witnesses can be vital if a matter proceeds to court on the basis that there's a dispute regarding the fault of each party in an accident. So make sure you get their name, full name, get their address, get their phone number, maybe an email address so that your legal representative can contact them if they're needed for court. And number five, contact a lawyer or legal representative who specializes in motor vehicle accidents. We work with some of the most amazing lawyers who can represent you in regards to a motor vehicle accident when you are not at fault. They can give you great advice, protect your interest, and ensure the repair of your vehicle to a high standard. They're aware of all your entitlements, including a rental car or a replacement vehicle, and so that you are not outta pocket. That's great to get a lawyer who specialize in motor vehicle accidents. So contact us if you'd like to be pointing in the right direction. So there are top five car accident tips. What to do firstly, don't admit fault. Second, exchange information with the other driver. Thirdly, take photos then identify any witnesses and contact a great lawyer or a legal representative who specializes in motor vehicle accidents.

Speaker 1: 17:54

We would love if you would review and subscribe to this podcast and also check out our social media. If you would like to get in touch with Simon and the down under investigation team for any reason, please check out our website at www.downunderinvestigations.comorcallonethreehundredeightfournineohohsevenoremailinfodownunderinvestigations.com. Thanks for listening.