‘Recruited off the street’: The teenagers being groomed in Melbourne’s plague of arson attacks

The car pulls up alongside a teenager walking a suburban street in Meadow Heights, and an organised crime figure leans out the window.

“Hey, bro, wanna make some money?”

This is how a firebombing starts – a youth barely into their teens, recruited directly off the street by a stranger offering cash and the lure of something dangerous.

Set fire to a car. Burn down a shop or a restaurant. Stage a carjacking or a home invasion.

The money on offer can be as low as $200.

This is just one of the ways shadowy gangland figures have found an army of disposable foot soldiers to drive the unprecedented spate of arson attacks plaguing Melbourne.

Over the past decade, arson attacks across the state soared nearly 75 per cent to 3600 incidents a year in 2026 from a record low in 2021.

In the past fortnight, police and fire services have been grappling with a spate of more than 23 firebombings on cars, shops and homes.

Five police and legal sources familiar with the recruitment system, but unable to speak publicly, have described crime figures using social media, random approaches on the street, and even the funeral of a teenager killed in knife violence as recruiting grounds.

Police have warned that some of these children have had no prior contact with the justice system before being convinced to commit arsons, abductions, carjackings and home invasions.

Two legal sources echo those fears, revealing more than half the young people fronting court under Victoria’s new “adult time for violent crime” laws have had no previous contact with police. Alarmingly, arson has become an entry point into even more serious crimes for some vulnerable recruits, they say.

The widespread use of “cleanskin” teenagers is a revolutionary development for organised crime.

Many of the accused who are being deliberately “groomed” come from disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly African teens.

Children as young as 13 have been arrested – and nearly killed – in a seemingly random spread of fires across the city.

Many of these fires are now not connected to the state’s “tobacco war” but are the result of personal and business vendettas that are being escalated or enforced with “cheap” contract arson attacks.

Crime as a service

In this month’s string of arson attacks, the targets were a motley collection – more than 14 cars, three private homes, a cafe and barbecue restaurant, a mechanic, a fruit shop, a tobacco store and a factory.

The only thing they appear to have in common is the way police suspect the vast majority of these attacks have been commissioned.

Victoria Police declined to comment for this story.

Police and underworld sources, who cannot be publicly identified, say the driving force for the wave of arsons – dating back to late 2023 — has been the emergence of a “crimetasker” or a “crime-as-a-service” ordering system.

At its most sophisticated, The Commission – the organised crime gang responsible for the “tobacco war” and the “bar wars” that plagued Melbourne earlier this year – have been operating a bespoke, secure phone-based app that is based off the popular “odd jobs” contracting app, Airtasker.

Jobs are commissioned anonymously by high-ranked organised crime players and accepted by other senior players in charge of running crews capable and willing to execute violent crimes, such as firebombings, robberies, drive-by shootings and murders.

The “chain” extending downwards often sees jobs ending up in the hands of teenagers who have been recruited by Oliver Twist-like “Fagin” characters.

They are connected via the app but the negotiations for the particular job or attack are done through private encrypted communications channels.

The app is self-erasing after 24 hours, if a specific code is not entered, and any advertised “job” disappears after a set time limit.

But it is not confined to just one single app – the system works more like a network of interconnected webs of communications allowing “shot callers” to accept jobs from an array of underworld figures.

“Different individuals or subgroups handle specific, discrete tasks, dividing the risk and responsibility, creating a chain of contractors and protecting higher-level actors while exploiting those at the bottom,” the AFP wrote in a submission to an ongoing parliamentary Inquiry into Combatting Crime as a Service.

“The fragmented nature of this process prevents participants from seeing the bigger picture and protects the facilitators.

“This process creates a cycle where vulnerable or unsuspecting individuals are drawn into a larger criminal enterprise.”

At the street level, the communications with the soldiers who conduct these attacks are almost exclusively run through free and widely available encrypted messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp and Threema.

An organised crime detective, who cannot be identified publicly, said most of the recruitment is being done by direct approaches in person and word-of-mouth referrals that are passed along anonymously via these encrypted apps.

On Thursday, Victoria Police issued a public appeal to help identify a series of online anonymous “handles” – Onepercent, Motion and Work – that are being used to recruit mainly teenage offenders into violent crimes.

“Tasking criminal offences while hidden behind an online platform is not a faceless crime,” Detective Acting Inspector Simon Pengelly said.

“Arsons, extortions, kidnappings and other violent criminal offending is being used to intimidate, influence and impose and is putting the Victorian community at risk.

“This offending is a top priority for Victoria Police, and we will continue to target everyone involved – from those who plan and finance it to those who task it and those who carry it out.”

Police intelligence, tendered in court proceedings, shows would-be arsonists are provided detailed instructions on what targets to hit and how to run the jobs, but never why.

This can include the time of day the attack should be staged, how much petrol to obtain and how much damage needs to be caused.

Can you get wooden plan(ks)...Want to put it on the ground next to curb…So ram comes up easy.

Instructions from a shot caller on how to stage an arson ram raid

One criminal in his mid-20s was contracted to do two arson jobs and three drive-by shootings between July and October 2024. The jobs paid between $10,000 and $20,000.

None of the targets were connected and, despite the offender pleading guilty, there is no discernible motive for any of them.

In one chillingly casual conversation recovered from a seized mobile phone, a shot-caller on an encrypted app known only as CASPA told “contractor” Jonah Vaivao – known as UM@GA – that his “client” would pay $15,000 for an arson attack on a retailer.

UM@GA: Any work
CASPA: Yes brother…Can you do today?
UM@GA : Burn or spray [shooting]
CASPA: Burn brother…Brother they agreed for 15 [$15,000]
UM@GA: Yeah that’s sweet…I found it….It’s under apartment

The target was the stone and benchtop business Aldo Brodic, which occupied the ground floor retail space of a residential building in Richmond.

CASPA: Is that all good
UM@GA: Yeah I don’t mind…I want 20 with the apartments brother
UM@GA: He said spray shop for 20
UM@GA: Consider it done
CASPA: To not risk apartments
UM@GA: Yeah if a casualty comes from the burn it’ll be fucked

Vaivao was sentenced last week to eight years and six months in prison, with a non-parole period of five years and six months for four charges of discharging a firearm, two charges of arson and several theft and weapons offences. The identity of his shot-caller remains a mystery.

This disconnect between the high-ranking organised crime figures ordering the jobs, those contracting them out and the young people who do their dirty work is the reason, police say, the arson attacks have been so difficult to stop.

Police have arrested only one significant shot-caller to date, a 20-year-old member of The Commission. The Age is not naming the man for legal reasons.

In July, he was arrested and charged for commissioning arsons, home invasions and kidnappings connected to the “bar wars” extortion plot.

The man is facing rare criminal charges for recruiting a child to commit a serious violent crime.

However, even with the 20-year-old in custody for more than three months – and police naming the operation as “the most consequential arrest” since the start of the tobacco wars in 2023 – the fires have accelerated.

Human error and human costs

The “crimetasker” system is a meat grinder for Victoria’s at-risk youth, experts and police warn.

In the string of fires set this month, a 13-year-old suffered burns to 90 per cent of his body after a botched attack on a home in Taylors Hills where he was promised a $3000 payment.

Two 16-year-olds appeared at the Children’s Court charged with conduct endangering life, recklessly causing serious injury in circumstances of gross violence, arson and theft of a motor vehicle. One had no prior criminal history.

Last week, teenagers aged 14, 16 and 17 were arrested in a stolen car loaded with jerry cans of petrol. Their destination is not yet known.

Earlier this year, Victoria Police launched Operation Phoenix, a series of intensive night patrols they say have proactively stopped youth offenders on their way to wage arson attacks.

While the crimetasker system helps protect those at the top, it also has a massive margin for error.

A number of the latest fire bombings have been classified by law enforcement as mistaken identity attacks with arsonists accidentally targeting either the wrong person or location.

“These people are not rocket scientists. They go off bad information, they don’t check. It means innocent members of the public are getting caught up in this,” a police source said.

In mid-October, a Berwick cafe was targeted twice in a week, with police publicly issuing warnings that the offenders are attacking the wrong target.

“What is particularly concerning is the offenders being ‘crime-tasked’ to carry out these serious offences on behalf of others, often have little or no understanding of who the intended target actually is,” Arson Squad Detective Inspector Chris Murray said.

You embarrassed the f--- out of me…Wallah…Hit the wrong gym then burn down a cyclist store next door…Bad amauters (sic).

Warning sent by a shot caller after a bungled attack

“In this case, the business and its owners appear to have been wrongly targeted, while the person believed to be the intended victim has no association whatsoever with the cafe.

“Innocent people are being placed at risk because criminals are treating serious violence as a contract.”

There are also nasty surprises in store for those who get caught by police.

When they are recruited, the teenagers are promised crime gangs will provide them with top-notch lawyers if they are caught.

“It never happens. Instead, it’s: ‘If you talk, we’ll kill your entire family’,” a source familiar with the recruitment system said.

Once you’re in, it’s also nearly impossible to get out.

“There’s a day of reckoning when they try to get out. They’re told: You can’t believe you’re going anywhere. You’re doing more jobs for us. Don’t ask fucking questions,” a police source said.

Children who live in residential or out-of-home care, are estranged from their families, neglected or homeless, excluded from schools or have learning problems have long been at increased risk of being groomed to commit crime.

Victoria’s Commissioner for Children and Young People Tracy Beaton said criminal gangs know who to prey upon, grooming them through gaming platforms and encrypted apps.

“I was talking to a young man the other day, and what he was talking about was, ‘You get into the gang because you’re able to provide for your family, but actually then you’re too frightened to leave the gang because the consequence of leaving, or the consequence of being exposed because you’ve committed crimes and somebody’s going to tell, or they know where you live, or they know who your sister is’,” Beaton said.

“They (criminal gangs) use mechanisms to maintain control … so it’s much harder to then find a different pathway.”

As well as facing legal consequences, Beaton says children need other reform measures, such as education and positive social inclusion, to give them an alternative future and reduce the likelihood of recidivism.

Monash University youth justice researcher Associate Professor Susan Baidawi said crime gangs exploit children to shield themselves from prosecution and expand their networks beyond state and international borders.

Baidawi – who is working with Think Village on campaigns for Victoria’s Violence Reduction Unit to disrupt recruitment methods – said the proliferation of encrypted messaging now sees cleanskin cash-for-crime candidates being recruited outside those from typical marginalised profiles.

“We have to understand that for crime networks this is a business model, and it’s a business model that’s proving quite effective,” Baidawi said.

“Particularly, what we’re seeing is greater use of online spaces and a rise in jurisdictions where it was less present previously, and the ease of recruitment of young people who have not previously been involved with police.”

To break the cycle and limit criminal recruiting, Baidawi said Australia needed to mirror the UK’s public health model, rather than a justice response.

“It’s certainly fair to say that Victoria and other Australian jurisdictions, particularly NSW, are behind the eight-ball on this,” Baidawi said.

“We have, to date, primarily been trying to use a criminal justice approach to increase penalties for adult exploiters, to increase penalties for young people for certain types of offending.

“But it’s easy to see that that isn’t going to be preventing these activities, that there are only responses after the harm has occurred.”