The incredible true story of Australia’s biggest insider trading heist, which turned $10,000 of seed money into $7.8 million in just nine months, will be told in a gripping new true crime podcast, The Sure Thing from The Australian Financial Review.

The six episode series about temptation, betrayal and a dream of becoming Australia’s Wolf of Wall Street will launch on February 22. 

Two-time Walkley Award winner and Financial Review investigative reporter Angus Grigg narrates the series, sponsored by McGrath Nicol, which pieces together a devastatingly simple scam that could be straight out of a movie. 

When university friends Christopher Hill and Lukas Kamay caught up during a “two day piss-up” in 2013, they hatched a near perfect plan to commit under-the-radar insider trading, agreeing to work towards the relatively modest profit of $200,000. 

Hill, who worked at the Australian Bureau of Statistics at the time, agreed to give unpublished data to NAB foreign exchange broker Lukas Kamay, who used the inside information to trade the Australian dollar.
 
“There were not a lot of moving parts,” says Christopher Hill, speaking publicly for the first time. “Just the simplicity of it is kind of why it [the plan] went ahead.”

“I certainly couldn’t see any consequences occurring to anyone; there were no victims in my face that I was being reminded of every day. I was just giving him [Kamay] some numbers on a piece of paper and we were making a bit of money.”

But greed, an insatiable appetite for life’s more glamorous elements, and betrayal, would mark this endeavour from the very beginning. Kamay would eventually make $7.8 million, while Hill – unaware his friend was secretly squirreling millions – made just $20,000.
 
As Hill lived in his rented suburban Canberra house, an almost Shakespearean story of betrayal was playing out, with Kamay splurging on Rolex watches, shopping for a Ferrari and even buying a $2.375 million loft on the 2014 series of The Block from contestants Alisa and Lysandra Fraser.  

“People always say to me you must hate Lukas,” says Hill.

The Sure Thing is the inside story of how this plan went wrong. It tells how the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission struggled for months to catch this “pair of amateurs”. 
 
Featuring heavily throughout the podcast is Hill, white collar crime expert Clinton Free, two AFP officers and one ASIC investigator, who all worked the case.
 
Hill was jailed for three years while Kamay was sentenced to seven years and three months after Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth described the case as “the worst instance of insider trading to come before the courts in this country”.
 

The weekly podcast spans Chris and Lukas’ cooking up their plan, to the police chase, the pair’s eventual arrest and the brutality and violence of life in jail. It contemplates the culture of risk taking by young men, the worshipping of money on trading floors and if a second chance is possible for white collar criminals.

For Angus Grigg, who has spent two decades investigating fraud and corporate wrongdoing, including stints as a foreign correspondent in China and Indonesia, the story is a rare insight into the inner workings of a criminal enterprise.
 
“Thanks to the honesty of Chris Hill, along with the AFP and ASIC officers the audience is taken inside a criminal conspiracy, police chase and life on the inside,” said Grigg.
 

The Sure Thing weekly podcast begins February 22 on Apple, Google, Spotify
For media enquiries:
Adrian Motte
Communications Manager, Nine
amotte@nine.com.au

Thursday, 18 February, 2021