Victims have already been repaid $7.25 million after liquidators of the dead fraudster sold off her assets in 2023 and 2024.

In September 2023, 32 investors initiated a class action lawsuit seeking compensation from the five audit firms that reviewed Caddick’s financial accounts from 2012 to 2020.

Melissa Caddick, aged 49, vanished in November 2020 shortly after authorities raided her luxurious residence in Sydney’s upscale eastern suburbs as part of an ASIC investigation into her Ponzi scheme.

Caddick engaged in “a sham or facade” using her company Maliver to transfer investor funds, Justice Markovic found in November 2021 in a separate Federal Court lawsuit brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Maliver was used to conceal that victims’ funds were spent on Caddick’s lavish lifestyle instead of being used to buy shares for their self-managed superannuation funds, the judge said.

Coroner Elizabeth Ryan in May 2023 ruled Caddick was dead, but she was unable to determine the cause because most of her body had not been found.

The fraudster’s badly decomposed right foot, which was still attached to a running shoe, washed up on a beach on the south coast of NSW in February 2021.

Caddick’s husband Anthony Koletti was the last person to see her alive and declared her missing.

He withheld information relating to his wife’s disappearance and could not be ruled out from being involved, the coroner found.