Amazing video of a confused Melissa Caddick being questioned about $2 million worth of jewelry during a raid on her home soon before she vanished has surfaced.
On the footage that was shown at the inquest into her disappearance, the infamous con artist Caddick is seen crumbling under pressure on November 11, 2020, as detectives zero in on her luxury jewelry collection.
The next day, Caddick—currently Australia’s most renowned fraudster—disappeared.
In connection with the current inquiry, the footage was made public as court-appointed receivers work to recover more than $23 million that is due to her former customers.
Prior to the raid by the AFP and ASIC at her Dover Heights home, Caddick had a life of luxury. However, that all ended when her world came tumbling down.
She purchased beautiful art, went on opulent European skiing vacations with her husband Anthony Koletti, and donned fashionable clothing and very costly jewellery.
The anxious atmosphere inside the eastern suburbs during the life-altering raid, which started with a 6.30am door knock, is shown in the AFP footage.
A detective queries her, “Ms. Caddick, are there any especially high value objects – merely in terms of our secure storage?”
“We want to take most of what you just went through,” they said.
Finally she says, “I’d say they’re all good value.”
What do you think is of great value?” he queries.
The necklaces cost between $80,000 and $100,000.
The two large Stefano Canturi necklaces that she kept hidden in a safe were thought to be what she was referring about.
Does anything cost more than them, he queries.
She gives a cursory once-over to the jewelry shown before saying “no.”
A big group of detectives interrogated Caddick over the course of 14 hours while painstakingly cataloguing, bagging, labeling, and removing any valuables from the house. They were all wearing protective gloves.
They took her luxury apparel, fine art collection, jewelry, and other belongings, packing up hundreds of boxes and covering many of them in plastic for transportation.
Thousands of dollars of foreign money were also discovered, and the video shows them being tallied.
In a 7News Spotlight interview, Koletti said that Caddick was “surrounded and confined” in her office by AFP and ASIC agents who wouldn’t let him in.
According to Mr. Koletti, the jewelry alone is worth more than $2 million.
Everything the investigators seized, according to Mr. Koletti, was “all emotional and everything high value.”
He said that although she liked her jewelry, “she loved people more.”
In a lengthy and well concealed Ponzi scam, Caddick is suspected of defrauding 72 clients—many of whom were family members and close friends—out of at least $23 million.
In an effort to recover millions for the out-of-pocket investors, receivers want to auction before Christmas.
In the video, several members of the AFP and ASIC are seen dragging them out of the home after dark and taking them down the stairs to complete Caddick’s humiliation.
After the investigators had departed, Koletti stated he didn’t ask her any questions and she immediately fell asleep.
The next morning, she disappeared, and Koletti subsequently told authorities that he thought she had left on her routine run.
Since then, she has not been seen.
Unbelievably, three months later, 400 kilometers from her home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, her severed foot was discovered washed up in an Asics running show on a New South Wales beach.
It is anticipated that Caddick would sell her house, which she purchased for $6.2 million but is now estimated to be worth up to $15 million, in order to recoup the money stolen from investors.