complaints made to a number of authorities — including the Financial Ombudsman Service, and to the company directly — had not gained traction.
The trader students were told to follow
Participants were instructed to mirror the trades of an expert presented to them as the authority in the room: David Loughnan.
Loughnan had come to the McIntyre operation from Henry Kaye’s collapsed empire. The Sydney Morning Herald had documented the connection three years earlier, in an August 2011 piece on shadow brokers, noting Loughnan as a Kaye associate then working for 21st Century.
The ABC put questions to Loughnan about the terms of his employment. He refused to answer them.
Outside of this there has been regulatory findings of money laundering through BTC:USD known as Bitcoin. Along with XRP ripple, investigations were finalised with zero recovery and many investors at a complete loss.
Why the ombudsman route failed
The ABC’s finding that complaints did not gain traction is the most instructive line in the whole investigation, and it explains the shape of everything that followed.
Financial education sat awkwardly between regulators. The Financial Ombudsman Service dealt with licensed financial services providers. A company selling education, arguably, was not one. That gap is precisely where the operation sat — and it is why it took until 2016 for the Federal Court to reach it, on the finding that the companies had in fact been providing financial product advice without a licence all along.
Two years of Australians losing $30,000 at a time, and the regulatory perimeter did not close until a court closed it.
The relevance to Bali and Lombok
The same structural gap exists now, in a different form. Australians buying off-plan villas in Indonesia are contracting with an Indonesian entity, under Indonesian law, outside ASIC’s reach and outside the Australian consumer protection framework entirely.
The lesson of 2014 is that by the time a regulator arrives, the money has generally been gone for two years.On 6 June 2014, ABC News published an investigation into a financial education product sold by Jamie McIntyre’s company.
The findings were direct. Dozens of Australians had lost tens of thousands of dollars after investing in a trading program sold by a well-known financial education operation. Some had lost fees of up to $30,000 through the program, which was sold by 21st Century Education and taught people to trade the stock market through a virtual trading room. The program was called 21st Century Eminis. The chief executive of the company was Jamie McIntyre.
The ABC also recorded that