Hurricane Tim: The fraudulent force of nature with a long list of global victims

John Darling V, a member of a famous Australian business dynasty, was only days from death as he sat in his wheelchair in a Melbourne hospital, gasping for breath and struggling to speak.

It was August 2019 and Darling was recording a dying declaration about who he believed was responsible for removing an estimated $3.5 million from his company’s accounts.

“It could only be one man,” said Darling, coughing, his voice strained: “Mr Timothy J. Alford.”

Several days later, Darling, 67, was dead. His video, along with a signed statement, led to the Victorian police issuing a warrant for Alford’s arrest. The warrant, which is still current, relates to obtaining a financial advantage by deception and making false documents. Alford has denied any wrongdoing.

But the twice-bankrupted Tim Alford was already on the other side of the world in Connecticut, ensconced in a grand six-bedroom mansion with a pool and 3.5 acres of garden owned by a French president’s former wife and her wealthy Moroccan husband. They were among the first of a very long list of Americans Alford preyed upon after skipping Australia with substantial debts to dozens of people.

Timothy John Alford, born in the NSW coastal town of Taree in January 1983, is a serial swindler who has allegedly cheated people out of an estimated $50 million throughout Australia and the US.

A major investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age can reveal that, in addition to the Victorian arrest warrant, Alford is also the target of an FBI investigation in the US.

The Herald and The Age spoke to more than 30 alleged victims or associates, some of whom were reluctant to go on the record, alleging they had been threatened by Alford or his connections.

Allegations of his extraordinary alleged rip-offs are documented in a proliferation of lawsuits across Australia and the US, where he is alleged to have embezzled money from friends and clients, been involved in stock market manipulation, failed to repay loans, dudded his own wedding caterers, cheated business partners, forged documents and misled the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

“He rips off 10, 15, 20 people in a city and goes to the next city … Charleston, Vegas, LA, New York, Miami,” one alleged victim from Florida told the Herald.

Despite multiple adverse judgments and police from four continents receiving complaints about him, “Hurricane Tim”, as one alleged victim refers to him, remains a fraudulent force of nature who continues unabated, leaving behind a trail of personal and financial devastation.

Many alleged victims said they sought legal advice, only to be told that it would cost them more money to chase him through the courts and, even if they were successful, it was unlikely Alford would pay the court-ordered debts.

Take the case of the estate of the late Hilary Hutchinson from Sydney, who successfully sued an American company associated with Alford in the NSW Supreme Court in November 2021. With steep default interest on the 2019 loan mounting daily, advisers to Hutchinson’s estate said the debt is now more than $20 million.

In a written response, Alford said the Supreme Court judgment had nothing to do with him and that he had not been a director of the company AD Securities America “since the first half of 2021”. However, on his LinkedIn profile, Alford states he was a director from January 2018 until December 2021.

And then there is the case of Manny Lopez, a former business partner from Nevada who allegedly lost $US1.4 million ($2.17 million).

“He is a man without a conscience … He took everything, absolutely everything, from me,” Lopez said.

One of his former Australian business partners said: “[The loss has] ruined my life. My relationship. I’ve lost a fortune … He needs to be taken down.”

Another Sydney associate who is allegedly owed money said: “Should Alford ever pen a memoir, it should be called Obtain Benefit by Deception.”

Trail of destruction

It was during a high-profile Sydney murder case more than a decade ago that Alford’s propensity not to pay his debts first came to light. In 2009, wealthy Point Piper property developer Ron Medich used his consigliere, former boxer Lucky Gattellari, to hire a hitman to murder his business nemesis Michael McGurk.

Evidence was given during Medich’s subsequent trial that he had used Gattellari to stand over debtors, one of whom was Alford, who had failed to repay Medich a $300,000 loan. In 2010, the frustrated property developer instructed Gattellari to “give that little bastard a slap in the face and get my money back for me”.

Fortunately for Alford, the pursuit by Gattellari and Medich was curtailed after they were arrested and jailed over their roles in the McGurk murder.

Alford has previously denied owing Medich any money. In 2023, he complained to the Herald that there was a “massive smear campaign” against him. “I was a stockbroker. Ron Medich was one of my biggest clients. I never owed him one cent.”

Alford was already financially ruined when he allegedly borrowed the money from Medich. He’d been bankrupted in 2007, then convicted and fined the following year for failing to comply with his bankruptcy trustee. Alford’s bankruptcy was due to elapse in mid-2011, but his trustee had sought an extension to 2015 because of Alford’s continued failure to provide information about his income.

In mid-June 2011, as he was to do many times later, Alford finally came up with the money to settle his debts and annul his bankruptcy.

In the ensuing years, Alford faced ongoing bankruptcy actions that he would ward off by allegedly finding new victims to defraud in order to settle his debts to earlier creditors.

Once his first bankruptcy was annulled in 2011, Alford allegedly set about perfecting his rip-off scheme.

One victim from Victoria, who is allegedly owed $500,000, explained that Alford’s modus operandi is like a Ponzi scheme. He alleges Alford persuades new victims to invest in a company that he says is just about to list on the stock exchange. However, the shares never get issued. Instead, Alford uses the money to pay for his affluent lifestyle and to repay the angriest of his old victims.

An early iteration of Alford’s skulduggery took place only months after he had come out of his first bankruptcy.

It was September 2011 and a group of investors advanced money to enable Alford’s company Whyte Management to be listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Alford assured them their money would be refunded should the listing not occur.

In June 2012, an article appeared in the Herald’s Insider column with the headline: “As one back door closes, another, apparently, opens”. It revealed that investors – who were trying to recover their $700,000 when Whyte failed to list – were shocked to discover that Alford was attempting to repeat the stunt, using the same company which now had a new name.

When the matter of Alford’s failure to repay investors came to court in 2014, District Court Judge Phillip Taylor found that Alford had engaged in “misleading conduct” as he’d done nothing to obtain an ASX listing. The judge also found that most of the $700,000 that was advanced to Whyte for the listing instead went straight into Alford’s coffers.

The posse of angry investors commenced bankruptcy proceedings when Alford didn’t pay the judgment debt. He fended them off by paying a partial amount, but then failed to pay the rest of the debt.

Also chasing Alford was Melbourne hospitality company The Big Group. After his lavish wedding to Charlotte Gray in March 2015 at Stonefields, the Victorian property of famous landscape designer Paul Bangay, Alford skipped town still owing almost $34,000 for the catering.

Alford told the Herald there was a dispute over “minor fees for a charge”, which he later paid in full. However, the caterers obtained a judgment against Alford for the debt in the Magistrates Court of Victoria. It remains unpaid.

Another in pursuit of Alford was Florida-based businessman Hugh Dean Fuller. In 2015 Fuller had obtained a judgment against Alford in the NSW District Court for $724,244.

Three years earlier Fuller had loaned $US450,000 to Alford’s company Jolimont Resources on Alford’s assurance that Jolimont was about to list on the ASX and Fuller would be able to convert his loan into shares at a substantial discount.

Once again the listing was illusory and Jolimont, like a string of Alford’s other companies, was struck-off, leaving investors out-of-pocket. Alford offered Fuller shares in another unlisted company as security for the debt. It was an escape strategy that would fool others, but Fuller was having none of it. He was determined to get his money back or bankrupt Alford.

Initially Alford associate Cameron Horne told Fuller’s lawyers that he would appear in court on Alford’s behalf. However, within weeks Horne had emailed saying he was no longer representing Alford “in any capacity” since discovering that Alford had “misrepresented and possibly fraudulently created a banking payment confirmation on Westpac … letterhead” to procure an amount of money from him.

When Fuller’s matter finally came to court in March 2017, Alford denied he’d received notice of the bankruptcy. He also claimed the bankruptcy was invalid on the grounds that he was no longer an Australian resident when the debt was incurred in June 2016.

Alford told the Federal Court he’d been residing permanently in Singapore since October 2015. However, Fuller’s legal team had subpoenaed Alford’s immigration records, which revealed that in July 2015 and October 2016 Alford had declared on his incoming passenger declarations that he was a permanent resident returning to Australia.

The address Alford gave for his “rental” property in Singapore turned out to be the St Regis Hotel, where rooms cost as much as $1000 a night.

The court also heard that on 16 ASIC declarations Alford had listed his address as an apartment overlooking the Opera House. However, when a process server went to the Macquarie Street apartment to serve the bankruptcy documents, the concierge informed him that Alford hadn’t lived there for five or six years and had not left a forwarding address. “Numerous people have attended here looking for him, including ASIC,” the concierge said in court documents.

In declaring that the estate of Timothy John Alford be “sequestrated under the Bankruptcy Act”, Justice Melissa Perry said she had formed “a poor view of the debtor’s credibility” and that Alford’s evidence was “at worst misleading or at best incomplete”.

According to his statement of affairs, which was filed with his bankruptcy trustee in August 2017, Alford had only $12.84 in the bank but owed $8 million to secured creditors and another $4.32 million to unsecured creditors.

But this series of unfortunate events failed to slow Hurricane Tim, who swept on, undiminished, to new pastures.

Common threads and old tricks

Bankruptcy is a bad place for a businessman to be. It’s an offence to travel overseas without the written consent of your trustee; any income earned over a certain amount must be used to pay off your debts, and obtaining credit becomes almost impossible.

But most significantly for Alford, bankrupts cannot be company directors. And this is where John Darling V, a member of “one of Australia’s oldest and respectable families”, re-entered Alford’s life.

In the 2012 Insider column in the Herald about investors trying to recover their $700,000 when Alford’s company Whyte failed to list, it was noted that Alford was trying the same trick but with a new company.

“A common thread”, said the Herald, was that the proposed chairman of the Alford companies, promising they were about to list, was the former deputy mayor of Sydney’s Woollahra Council “and a member of one of Australia’s oldest and respectable families, John Darling”.

There was no mention of Darling’s own questionable past.

The year 1991 was Darling’s “annus horribilis”. Things started to go wrong for the lawyer early in the year, with accusations from a client that he had stolen funds. This was followed by his involvement in a scandal over a failed multimillion-dollar property deal he helped secure for Woollahra Council.

But the rumours and intrigue hit fever pitch when Darling disappeared towards the year’s end.

When police arrested a man for breaking into a luxury villa in Port Douglas in February 1992, the man claimed to be Walter Gerald Wall, a bumbling Canadian tourist who’d only been in the country for a few days.

After admitting his real identity to the police, Darling claimed he’d only broken in to watch the cricket and to make a comparison between the units at the Port Douglas Mirage and the one he owned on the Sunshine Coast.

He was later convicted, without charge, over the break-in.

But Darling wasn’t the only person Alford recruited to front his schemes as Alford was cooling his heels in the financial sin bin of bankruptcy.

In 2021, headlines linked Alford’s sister Hollie Nasser to a Sydney scandal when it was revealed she was in a relationship with her best friend’s husband, Charlie Aitken. Hollie’s husband Chris Nasser, one of the biggest investors in Aitken’s fund management company, promptly quit the board, taking his $7.5 million investment with him.

As if the embarrassing details of the love triangle weren’t bad enough, it emerged that in late 2018 the newly famous Hollie had been appointed managing director of CannHarvest, a failed cannabis start-up that her brother had promised investors would be listed on the ASX.

Instead, it had gone bust, owing investors more than $1 million. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on Hollie Nasser’s part.

CannHarvest’s founder Troy Langman also alleges that Alford defrauded him of $250,000. He wrote to the administrators in late 2019, saying, “The director Troy Langman is the victim of a fraudster, and is one of many individuals and self-managed super funds that have had money stolen.”

Alford told the Herald in 2021 that CannHarvest “did not provide the results expected” and that he had personally repaid “hundreds of thousands” to those investors he introduced to CannHarvest. Like almost everything Alford ever said, this, too, was false.

“He’ll never come back to Australia. It’s everyone else’s fault. He has a narcissistic personality,” said Max Cleveland (not his real name), one of the West Australian financial advisers whose reputation was shredded after his clients invested in Tim Alford’s allegedly fraudulent projects.

What Cleveland did not realise when his clients invested – because Alford had failed to mention it – was that the managing director of the company he was spruiking as an independent broker was his sister.

In 2018 Alford flew Hollie to Perth to pitch CannHarvest at an investors’ meeting with financial advisers and their own clients.

Cleveland thought it was odd that Nasser had to read from a script, which included that she was “pleased to offer you an opportunity to invest in CannHarvest Limited, prior to its initial public offering scheduled early 2019”.

CannHarvest was the group holding company for food-related products derived from cannabis or hemp seed, she explained. The spiel also included the billion-dollar potential that the hemp‑based industry was expected to be worth.

“Reading from a PowerPoint presentation never impresses me much but she was a good-looking lady, she was pretty spunky, and many of my clients invested,” Cleveland said.

By the end of 2018 about 70 investors had contributed seed-funding totalling about $760,000 towards the listing of CannHarvest.

Alford had allegedly conducted the fundraising under the auspices of a “consultancy” to AD Securities, to which Darling had been appointed director at the time of Alford’s bankruptcy.

As well as CannHarvest, Alford had raised $2.5 million by allegedly pretending to float AD Capital, which was promising to consolidate hundreds of wealth management businesses to become the largest non-bank-owned wealth advisory firm in Australia.

Cleveland had recommended the float to his clients on the back of Alford’s rosy claims that it employed 50 investment specialists. But in November 2019 he made a disquieting call to the headquarters of AD Capital to chase up his brokerage fee, which was yet to be paid.

He was shocked when the receptionist revealed she had not been paid in weeks, either.

“What are you talking about?” Cleveland said. “Who does the work there? I thought there were 50 advisers.”

“No,” she said. “It’s just me.”

Later that month AD Capital, just like CannHarvest before it, was placed into administration.

The Herald and The Age have obtained AD Securities’ bank statements, which reveal that Alford transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal use, including transferring more than $400,000 to Sydney firm Bowles Lawyers, which had acted for Alford in his unsuccessful challenge to stop Fuller bankrupting him.

On September 17, 2018, a payment of $175,000 – the last of four to the law firm – was made from the Westpac account of AD Securities. Three weeks later, Alford’s bankruptcy was annulled as he’d settled his debt to Fuller.

In his deathbed video, recorded on August 6, 2019, and later given to police, John Darling alleged his signature had been used by Alford – without his approval or knowledge – to gain access to the AD Securities’ Westpac bank account that held investors’ funds.

Five days later, Darling, 67, died at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital.

Alford acknowledged to the Herald and The Age that Darling had made these allegations but said they were “the result of a misunderstanding” and that Darling had formally withdrawn them.

In a statement to this masthead, Victoria Police said they have an active warrant of arrest for Alford “in relation to offences of obtain financial advantage by deception and make false documents”.

The police statement also said, “Intelligence suggests the man is currently not in Australia”.

‘Nothing can be done’

At 9pm on February 18, 2020, a furious Tim Alford, who was now in New York, allegedly phoned another Perth financial adviser who had been dogged in his pursuit of Alford for the return of the funds his clients had invested in AD Capital due to Alford’s misleading claims.

“Tim blew me off and shouted down the phone line, ‘I know where you live, I can get you and you don’t want to mess with me’,” the adviser told the Herald and The Age. Subiaco police later said there was nothing they could do about “a threat from a foreign jurisdiction”.

The Perth adviser was awarded a judgment against Alford for $823,000 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in September 2021.

Like dozens of other victims he is yet to receive a cent.

Through his lawyers, Alford claimed the allegations put to him by this masthead were incorrect and inaccurate and that he had been given insufficient time to prepare his responses.

NEXT: Tomorrow, the Herald and The Age’s investigation follows the fraudulent force of Hurricane Tim as he continues to wreak havoc throughout the United States.