Cropping out crime proceeds

Editorial: Danielle Ford

Photography: Supplied

From the outside, it looked like an unassuming suburban house, but after the initial tip-off from Air Wing, local members discovered an elaborate hydroponic cannabis crop set up.

Detective Sergeant Lindsay Stephens, a detective senior constable at the Wyndham Crime Investigation Unit (CIU) at the time, said it didn’t take detectives long to begin their investigations.

“The uniform members acted quickly to lock the house down and establish a crime scene and when our team started in the morning, we got a search warrant and went to the address to take over the crime scene,” Det Sgt Stephens said.

“Almost 90 cannabis plants were seized from the property and the hydroponic setup dismantled.”

Det Sgt Stephens said ‘crop house’ jobs were a relatively regular occurrence in the area, and it wasn’t until further investigation it was discovered that 16 other properties across Melbourne’s western suburbs were owned by the same woman.

“They had all been purchased within the previous two years and it was suspected several of them may have been used as crop houses also,” she said.

“We suspected that she was running a sophisticated drug set up and employing ‘sitters’ to mind the crop houses.”

Despite being able to link the properties, the investigation kept hitting dead ends when the sitter of the Hoppers Crossing address could not be found and there was no concrete evidence linking the owner to the operation of the crop house.

It was at this point Det Sgt Stephens reached out to the Criminal Proceeds Squad to approach the case from a different angle.

The Criminal Proceeds Squad is a specialist team that investigates unexplained wealth around criminals and their syndicates.

Detective Acting Sergeant Tim Feben was working in the squad when the job came in.

“Our initial investigations confirmed the properties were all owned by the one woman,” Det A/Sgt Feben said.

“We then applied for her income records from the Australian Taxation Office, which showed no steady income source despite owning millions of dollars of property.”

From here, the squad continued to dig into the woman’s financial records and discovered that the properties had been purchased by obtaining false loans using fake employment details and payslips.

“After discovering these false loans, we were able to bring charges against the woman under the Confiscation Act 1997,” Det A/Sgt Feben said.

“As a result, all 16 properties were restrained and recovered by the state for a total of about $6.7 million.”

While criminal charges were not able to be laid, Det Sgt Stephens said the result of this case was a win for detectives.

“That’s 16 potential crop houses shut down and a large amount of cannabis that was removed before it could be sold,” she said.