106. False Sex Abuse Allegations are a Billion Dollar Industry in Australia

The organised crime ring was rounded up in February 2025 after 4000 claims were made against teachers, with 1.3B AUD in payouts. Apparently that seemed suspicious.

Normally I don’t do “reaction” papers. This did get my attention however. I’ve done a video with Josh Bycer on the need for diversity 6 years ago, where I also gave advice on how to deal with harassment in the workplace. I’m on the asexuality spectrum, and open about that. So I’m a hard target. But after being in a situation where I had what I felt was a legal obligation to whistle blow in a work environment, I was hit with a pre-emptive sexual harassment claim.

I follow my own advice and document anything that feels weird in my work environment when I can’t work remotely. Still, even though I did pretty well financially with my counter suit, it was one of the most stressful situations of my life. And, if you follow my writing, you know I’ve had one of the world’s top 1% most stressful lives. Finding out that men in such situations are presumed guilty makes it exceedingly easy to make false allegations, and very hard/expensive to defend against same. Not only did the CEO accusing me gloat about how easy it is to make such claims, but so did the opposing council AND even my council. All of this in writing.

So it should come as no surprise that some clever criminals would abuse this legal bias to basically factory farm male teachers in my area. It’s hard to imagine an easier way to make over a billion dollars for 7 criminals, with such low risk and effort.

While I’m a bit surprised they were even caught, I guess 4000 accusations against one relatively small group of people might have generated some attention. I shudder to think how many thousands of scams like this are in progress worldwide.

While the news went into great detail about the arrests, what it didn’t talk about was the victims of this crime. I was able to find out from other sources that the targets were 4000 presumably male teachers. It seems that they were likely teaching high school or such, so they could have been charged with sex crimes against minors.

I did some digging and found that 23% of “minor attracted” persons arrested for such, attempt suicide. 25% of people made aware that they are being investigated for such a crime (regardless of guilt), if they commit suicide, will do it within 48 hours. While it’s unclear if I can multiply those two numbers together, it seems intuitive that I can. That would suggest that perhaps 230 of those falsely accused teachers are already dead from suicide if they were formally charged with a crime. Could Australia have just paid out reflexively without notifying the accused teachers?

To me this is the part that upsets me the most, more than the potential loss of 1.3B AUD. If there was even one loss of life here, I hold a “men are guilty until proven innocent” culture responsible. Further, false accusers rarely are held accountable. In this case they were because there was such a large amount of fraud attached to it. If there are any related suicides, I would be curious to see if a wrongful death or such charge would be added.

If this isn’t already being copied world-wide, I would expect it will be now. It’s just easy money. If this group had been a bit less greedy they might have gotten away with it. 400 false allegations instead of 4000 might have been fine with the Australian government, and that would have produced 130M AUD in payouts. Split 7 ways that’s still almost 20M each.

And the reduced 23 to 100 suicides (after false convictions) of teachers might have just made for good evening news and reduced superannuation payments.