Black markets usually operate under the cover of darkness.
But when a woman was charged with fraud over a so-called 'cash for demerit points' scheme, it exposed one in plain sight.
Now I'm going to join it.
Demerit points, by design, are meant to keep motorists accountable and deter unsafe driving.
When a camera catches a vehicle committing an offence, the registered owner is penalised — usually by incurring demerit points on their licence and a fine, for which the number and value varies per offence.
If they weren't behind the wheel at the time, the owner can nominate another driver who was.
When a driver accrues too many points they risk losing their licence.
It's a simple system but there's a fundamental flaw.
It assumes trust — and that trust is being exploited.
There are countless people, posts and pages across social media that purport to "wipe" demerit points.
All have the same premise: they offer to fraudulently take the blame for driving offences, at a cost.
In some places, people's points are bartered for quick cash. In others, people advertise their phone numbers.
Most say to contact them by WhatsApp. So I did.
Tom Hartley: Hi it's tom, saw your fb post about Demerits. Can u help?
Person 1: Hey mate can you send me a photo of the fine please and we can go from there
Tom Hartley: Can u explain how it works?
Person 1: $50 a point plus the fine amount after the nomination is completed.
How it works is I need a few details from you I then go ahead and do the nomination then after that you will receive a confirmation email from service nsw and the fine also disappears from your service nsw app straight away.
Person 1: Details I need are
Person 1: Penalty number, date of offence, full name and email address
Person 1: Do you have the fine now
Other exchanges immediately got to the point.
Tom Hartley: Hi it's tom. I saw ur post on Facebook about demerit points and wondering if u can help me
Person 2: Hi
Person 2: How many do you need ?
Tom Hartley: How does it work?
Person 2: Nominated online
Person 2: Payment after nomination
Person 2: Which state is it ?
Tom Hartley: Qld. Can u help?
Person 2: Yeah i can
Person 2: Can i call you if possible?
Under Queensland law, conversations can be recorded without the other person's consent.
So when the phone rang, I picked up.
Over the course of an hour, 7.30 engaged in four different calls with basic enquiries about trading demerit points, each lasting between 5 and 10 minutes.
Every caller we spoke to wrongly promised that the proposed transaction carried no risk.
One man claimed he worked directly with the "licence office", and pushed back when his legitimacy was questioned.
A third claimed he was a middleman, instead of running and overseeing the scheme himself.
He even gave a testimonial for the services, saying "he's pretty good at what he does" because "he got me out of a fine".
"Send us your fine and we nominate it and happy days, mate. You don't have to worry about losing your licence or whatever."
Most of the schemes encountered could be described as amateur operations, posted on Facebook pages with little fanfare.
But there was one exception: a website bearing a striking resemblance to Service New South Wales — the state's official online administration portal.
Curious, I hit the contact button and was redirected to WhatsApp.
Tom Hartley: Hi my name is Tom. I have points I need to get rid off. Can you help?
Person 3: Yes no problem what did you get?
Tom Hartley: I got 3 points & 423$ seatbelt.
Tom Hartley: Can you explain how it works?
Person 3: I still do it as a nomination but I have certain access to live dummy accounts on their system and know how to get it accepted straight away and keep it all automated. I can clear the $434 fine and 3 points for total $550, ill do it for $500 total if sorting it today....I just need penalty notice number, date of offence and full name it's in and it will take 3 minutes ...you only pay after you can see it's sorted.
That works out to be $38 per demerit point for option one, or $22 for the latter.
It's one of the cheapest offers I've had so far.
Tom Hartley: Wot do u mean by dummy accounts? Can I get in trouble?
Tom Hartley: Does it really work?
Person 3: No trouble and yes of course it works you will be able to see it's done before paying
But when asked to clarify the process and if it's something they do often, the tone shifted.
Tom Hartley: Can u explain the process? Have u done this lots?
Person 3: Where did you get my number
It's hard to verify or quantify the scale of these individual demerit point schemes that are thriving across the country.
But evidence obtained by 7.30 suggests the black market is flourishing in one state: Queensland.
A loophole you could drive through
It's clear from court matters alone that there is a significant weakness in Queensland's demerit points system that has allowed for extreme instances of the accumulation of demerit points to go undetected.
The failure has enabled "cash for demerit point" schemes to operate in plain sight for years, and be exploited at a commercial scale.
In one case currently before the courts, a 27-year-old woman is alleged to have racked up 1,150 demerit points and more than $600,000 in fines before she was arrested.
Queensland detectives allege the woman, arrested in Woodridge, south of Brisbane, ran a demerit point rort on social media for "at least four years".
She is accused of having 1,266 traffic infringements transferred into her name.
If 12 demerit points puts a licence at risk of suspension in Queensland, that's nearly 96 times the limit.
Officers from Quensland Police's Financial and Cyber Crime Group said the woman had profited "from drivers seeking to avoid licence suspensions".
"Many of those allegedly using these services should have had their licenses suspended but were instead able to continue driving on our roads," Queensland Police Detective Superintendent Craig McGrath said after her arrest.
She remains remanded in custody and is expected to front the Brisbane Magistrates' Court later this month, facing one charge of fraud.
But how could one driver allegedly accumulate so many points over such a long period of time without being detected?
It's a question 7.30 asked the agencies that administer the demerit points system — the Queensland Revenue Office (QRO) and the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR). They did not answer.
Instead, a government spokesperson responding on the agencies' behalf said: "When fraud offences are detected, they are dealt with by the full force of the law".
Further questions about how the agencies detect fraud and how often they do so went unanswered.
David Tuffley, a cybersecurity expert at Griffith University, said if the government's systems "can't see a pattern that obvious" there are no detection controls in place.
"It's five transfers a week, every week for four years, and allegedly all onto one licence," he told 7.30.
"Banks put more scrutiny on a $200 card purchase than Queensland apparently applies to 1,200 demerit transfers.
"Most loopholes are tricky to find and exploit. Not this one."
The agencies responsible for administering the system in Queensland won't say how many drivers have escaped suspension, whether those involved were investigated or what safeguards are in place.
"We no longer have the guarantee that the drivers around you are allowed to be there," Mr Tuffley told 7.30.
"Once points can be bought, a safety measure becomes a paid transaction and only people who can afford it can keep driving.
"The fix has to be in the government system."
Cash for cocaine
7.30 can reveal a criminal case that shows the Queensland government was first made aware of the existence of false nomination rackets several years ago.
In February 2016, Bin Zhang was caught speeding through Brisbane's Clem7 tunnel and received a $235 fine and three demerit points.
Instead of accepting them, he paid another man to fill in false driver details on the notice. Zhang signed the declaration and sent it away.
He repeated the process 19 times over six years, paying the other man to help him avoid infringements, except on three occasions when he "fabricated" a false identity.
By the end of 2022, he had avoided $5,798 in fines and 55 demerit points. But Zhang was just one customer in a wider scheme.
A Queensland District Court judgment said the "principal offender" facilitated similar offending by hundreds of motorists.
Between 2012 and 2022, 1,400 false nominations were submitted, avoiding more than $420,000 in fines.
In February 2024, Zhang was sentenced to four months' imprisonment, wholly suspended for 12 months, and disqualified from driving for six months. His multiple appeals were unsuccessful.
7.30 can also reveal details of a separate "harebrained scheme" that left a district court judge "astounded" it had gone on for so long.
Nicholas John Anforth had a gram-a-day cocaine addiction that cost him $6,000 dollars a month. He needed a way to fund it.
At 23 years old, as heard during his sentencing at Beenleigh District Court, he assumed an alias and advertised his services on Facebook.
Drivers caught on camera could send him a photo of their ticket, and for the cost of the fine, plus $100 for every demerit point, Anforth would make the problem disappear.
But Anforth didn't pay the fines. As for the points — some were transferred to his own licence, but "about 144 times," he transferred them to three other men who were unaware of the scheme.
In total, $93,000 in fines were falsely nominated to those men.
His offending was only uncovered in 2024 when one of the men discovered he had accumulated $20,000 in fines.
By this point, Anforth had pocketed more than $100,000. When he was arrested police said he and had falsely nominated 695 demerit points.
Anforth pleaded guilty to fraud, attempting to pervert the course of justice and three counts of obtaining or dealing with other people's identification information.
He was sentenced to three years' jail in June.
"I'm just astounded that this can go on for as long as it went on without there being some sort of mechanism of figuring out that … the one person is getting so many fines," Judge Dzenita Balic said.
Crown prosecutor Paul Kay agreed, telling the court "you would've thought there'd be flags come up" and the scheme itself "seems to be a fairly easy thing to do".
"It strikes at the heart of the administration of justice and of the licencing scheme within Queensland — that you then have a number of people driving around on licences that potentially should have been suspended for traffic offending."
Queensland Police would not tell 7.30 if Anforth's customers were investigated or if any safeguards were introduced after his offending came to light.
QRO and TMR also did not respond to questions concerning any efforts to trace motorists linked to large-scale fraudulent nomination schemes.
7.30 understands their respective investigations were limited by resources.
A criminal challenge
In the face of such offending, 7.30 has been told that Queensland police officers have flagged the issue with government agencies on several occasions, and that they have been frustrated by a lack of change.
The agencies did not respond to questions about the current system and if it is fit for purpose to detect such fraudulent schemes, and instead responded through a government spokesperson.
"The Department of Transport and Main Roads and the Queensland Revenue Office work closely with the Queensland Police Service to identify, assess and respond to suspected fraud," the spokesperson said.
Mr Tuffley said it's clear from the three schemes that have been prosecuted that fraud "lives in the gaps" between the agencies.
"Transport, Revenue and Police can each truthfully say they did their job, and that's the problem," he said.
"Someone needs to take responsibility for the whole thing."
He believes the Queensland government needs to conduct an urgent audit.
"Run the query, take a deep breath, and find out just how big this is," he said.
"Any such future scams should be caught at the fifth transfer, not the 1,200th."
As long as loopholes like these exist, so too will methods that seek to exploit them.
It's not illegal to make a simple enquiry about them, like I did.
But lawyers say anyone who follows through to get out of their traffic offence risks prosecution, as do the people who run the services.
"Once someone knowingly provides false information to transfer an infringement, they risk committing a criminal offence," lawyer Kristy Bell told 7.30.
"It doesn't matter whether they're the person paying someone to take the points or the person selling that service.
"Both can face serious criminal charges, including an actual term of imprisonment."
Credits
- Reporting: Tom Hartley and Xanthe Kleinig
- Photography and videography: Christopher Gillette and Mark Leonardi
- Production: Kate Ainsworth
- Editor: Paul Johnson
Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV
Source: ABC Australia · Tom Hartley, Xanthe Kleinig, Kate Ainsworth, Paul Johnson
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