Three years after his identity had been stolen and his private banking documents found on the side of the road, Barry Lakeman has been advised by Commonwealth Bank that a review is under way.
Originally, the bank suggested to Lakeman that he and his wife were to blame, that they dumped their own documents on the side of the road in Victoria.
This week, the bank advised Lakeman to seek redress via the Financial Ombudsman’s Service (FOS), a private complaints service funded by the banks according to how many complaints they incur.
In keeping with CBA’s attempts to cover up the scandal over its 54,000 money-laundering breaches, and not report crime to the police, the bank appears not to have reported the Lakeman identity theft.
Michaelwest.com.au revealed the identity theft claims earlier this year as the farmer from Western Australia, who is dying from bone cancer, sought to have the bank investigate the matter and recover illicit payments made from the theft of his personal documents. Now the police are involved too.
Lakeman’s banking documents were found on a roadside curb in Victoria three years ago. An officer from the Commonwealth Bank later called him and suggested he or his wife Karen had taken them to Victoria themselves; that they’d lost them.
A couple of months ago, local police called to ask Barry Lakeman if he’d lost his gun licence. They had found it, they told him. It displayed his photo but the licence number didn’t match. “It was a forgery … the number at the top of the card was different from the number on my card”.
There have been other incidents of fraud on his identity. He said last week that an Equifax report showed a number of CBA alerts over a two year period between January 2014 and February 2016 which suggests the bank had been monitoring his accounts regularly even though he says he has no business account with the bank.
The question should be asked, why were the police not told before? It’s a crime after all.
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Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.