Conversations
Why this private investigator loves the cases others have given up solving
17 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Ken Gamble is a private investigator. Over his long and colourful career, Ken has staked out bikies making false insurance claims, raided factories pumping out fake Bart Simpson t-shirts and burst in on boiler rooms full of online scammers. Ken's focus these days is on complex cybercrime and large-scale financial fraud with his agency, IFW Global.
But perhaps the investigations that have had the most impact are the cases that Ken has taken on pro bono. The ones on behalf of grieving families overseas whose adventure-loving kids had come to Australia as young backpackers and then just disappeared. Hi, Ken.
Chapter 2: What inspired Ken Gamble to become a private investigator?
Hi. You spent part of your childhood living in Mount Isa. What took your family there? I did. My father was a builder. We started our life in Mount Isa in the 70s and I started primary school there at Central State School in 1971. What are your memories of how Mount Isa looked and smelt back in the 70s? It was hot. It was very hot.
It was a very hot place and it had this, the big mines were pumping out this sulphur all the time. So there was this incredible sulphur smell, which I never knew what it was as a kid. But years later, I come to learn that it was the sulphur in the air coming out of that big chimney. And how was your dad's work as a builder going in those early years? He was booming as a builder.
He had a company called Gamble Builders in Mount Isa in the early 70s and he was getting big contracts. He was building townships. He was really, things were booming for him up probably until the mid-70s when he had health problems. What was your dad like at home after a long day of work? Exhausted. He was a very hard worker. He had a lot of men working for him and it was physical.
It was out in the sun. He'd wear this white hard hat. He'd come home in a truck filled with tools and
building parts in the back of the the truck and he was always exhausted he'd go to the pub after it was a very big drinking culture in Mount Isa so he was one of these guys that would go to the the pub and have a few beers after work with the boys and you know come home with a roast chicken in the car. What kind of impact did that have on your family your dad's drinking?
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Chapter 3: How did Ken transition from personal injury fraud to cybercrime investigations?
I guess it was pretty normal for us at the time. But, again, it wasn't until later that we realised that it was, you know, there was domestic arguments and, you know, stuff happening in the family that was uncomfortable. And we realised that Dad and Mum were not getting along well at all by the mid-'70s and things were tough. You know, we would see them fighting. We would see my father...
occasionally engaged in fighting. So there was aggression there.
Chapter 4: What significant missing person cases has Ken worked on?
And I think that the drinking was bringing a lot of that aggression on, you know, from years of probably trauma in his early life or whatever it may be. Do you remember feeling scared as a little kid of your dad? No, no, I don't ever feel being scared. I think that Dad was never physical with us, myself, my brother or my sisters.
He certainly was physical with other people but I didn't have any time when I felt scared of him but he was a big man and I was a little boy so whatever Dad would say, you know, I would follow. What about life for your mum while the family was in Mount Isa? What was it like, do you think? Well, she was the secretary for the building company, so she was working very hard at home with the kids.
She was also an organ teacher and piano teacher. She used to perform at some local places. You know, I remember Fiddler on the Roof was one show she did. And so between that and running the business and us kids, it was a full-time job and mum worked so hard.
Chapter 5: How did Ken's childhood experiences shape his career path?
And she had a tough start to her life too, your mum. She did. She was an only child. Her mother passed away giving birth to mum. It was in those days before they could treat these types of issues. And 1936 she was born and the mother passed away. So she entered the world without a mother, had a very loving father, but grew up with a stepmother as an only child.
You mentioned, Ken, that your dad's business was booming until he had some health problems. What did that mean for his company once he got sick? Well, it was gallstones. He got gallstones. He had to have an operation. And once he had the operation, he was off the tools. He was off the...
the sites he had to appoint a couple of his guys to take over and that's when the problem started he was weeks and weeks off because he also got sick from the operation so he took a significant amount of time off work and while he was taking that time off their builders weren't building. They were drinking on the sites and they were just having a lot of fun.
And unfortunately, when it come time to pay all the bills, there was no money to pay the bills. All the money had been spent and he ran into significant financial problems. As a kid, how did that hit home for you? How did you realise that there were big financial problems at home?
Well, I didn't realise that it was going on until some men in suits came to the house and took our pool table that we'd got for Christmas. It would have been Christmas of 76. We got this lovely big pool table and we were wrapped. It was in this big room called the rumpus room.
And we, these men came in one day with some sort of court order and took our belongings, took one of the vehicles away, a Toyota Land Cruiser. They seized that vehicle and they took away anything valuable in the house and they were creditors of Dad's bankruptcy. And if your dad was owing money around town, I imagine there were some pretty angry people in Mount Isa. Yes.
Eddie, did you see that play out? Yes, there was. Yeah, there was some of them turned up at our house. One turned into a pretty ugly fistfight. One day, and I remember Dad ramming his car and trying to push him over the cliff. And so we witnessed some, you know, pretty violent episodes.
I don't know, I can't remember if I was scared at the time, but it was certainly very concerning seeing that type of behaviour. Your family ended up leaving Mount Isa. Where did you move to? Well, Dad had bought a pub in 1975. He'd bought a pub up in the Gulf of Carpentaria called the Gregory River Hotel. It was in the middle of nowhere, 300 miles north of Mount Isa.
He bought it for 50 grand, $50,000. And it was a little oasis on a beautiful river and it was just this little pub that was all run down. He got an opportunity to buy it, so he bought it. And started renovating it. When Dad went bankrupt, he decided to move the family because they took our house. So we had to sell the house. And we decided we were all going to move up.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Ken face while working in the boxing circuit?
My teacher's name was Miss Reed. I still remember. And where would you do it physically? They would send up the books from Mount Isa and we'd have to get on the radio for one hour per day and talk to the teacher in Mount Isa. She'd be beaming from the headquarters. Did that give you a lot of time outside of your schoolwork then? Was there a lot of freedom when you were living there?
Yes, it sure did. And that was the great thing about it was that with correspondence, with the School of the Air, I could get ahead. I could actually work ahead. I figured it out really quickly that if I get two or three weeks...
ahead of my work, I can take time off and go out mustering cattle on cattle properties because the local ringers, you know, young men that were coming into the pub were always saying, oh, you know, come on, boy, we'll teach you to be a jackaroo. You know, a jackaroo is a young ringer, a young cowboy.
And so I started going to the properties and learning how to break in horses and how to brand and, you know, ear tag cattle and castrate them and all these horrific things that I
How old were you when you were doing that?
I was 12. 12 years old. And did you enjoy being out there with those kind of grown men? Absolutely. It was freedom for me. It was just amazing. It was away from mum and dad and, you know, I was becoming a teenager so it was kind of my way of getting out of the house and doing adventurous stuff. We were shooting, you know, we were hunting, you know, we were doing all these incredible things.
Before my 13th birthday I'd done just about all of it, you know, driven Mack... Ken Worth semi-trailers, driven a bulldozer, you know, all this stuff before my 13th birthday. What about life at the pub? Like, first of all, the workload for your mum and dad, what was that like running the pub for them? It was pretty busy.
We had a couple of workers, so we had a couple of employees that were at the pub full-time, living there and helping dad. Dad was the publican, so he would obviously run the bar and everything else. Mum, he built a restaurant, so... So dad focused on the pub side. He'd go down to Mount Isa and bring the alcohol back in his own truck and all this sort of stuff.
And mum was focused on the restaurant. You know, we built a restaurant there and pub meals and counter meals and all that sort of stuff and, of course, looking after us kids and doing homeschooling. I'm exhausted just hearing this. It was a long day.
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Chapter 7: How does Ken utilize technology in his investigations?
So that was an opportunity that Mum and Dad took and packed up his Dodge Fuso truck, a big 10-tonne truck with all of our belongings and animals and everything. What animals were you bringing with you? We had two horses, a nanny goat, a pig, a pet pig called Honky, which was a white pig. I've still got photos of Honky. It was a domestic pig.
It grew up since it was a piglet and used to sit down for peanuts in front of the pub. It would sit down like a dog and you'd feed it peanuts. So true story.
And a cockatoo. And a cockatoo. All of you in the back of this truck.
All of you in the back of this big Dodge Fuso truck with our furniture and belongings. Our whole life was in that truck. And the five of us travelled down. My older sister was in boarding school, but this time in Charters Towers. Myself, my brother and sister, we all jumped in the back of the cab and we took off down to Yamundi on the Sunshine Coast. The tropics of the Sunshine Coast. Yeah.
You know, you'd been living a life of so much freedom. Your schooling had been via School of the Air. What was your first day back in regular schooling like? It was actually not very good because I was a white-skinned boy with a crew cut and I was suddenly in a school with a bunch of guys with suntans and long hair. So I had come into a surfy environment. Back in 1977, everyone had long hair.
but I didn't. So I was immediately an outcast. The day I walked into that school and someone had a go at me, someone called me a skinhead or something and I had a punch up with a guy.
Day one.
Yeah, a guy named Danny and he was one of the biggest kids in the class. And the fight got broken up, but I did pretty well because I had fought a lot up in the Gregory. I'd had a lot of fights and And I was a good fighter and my way of dealing things was just start throwing punches because that's what I was taught when I was growing up looking at Dad, the way he would deal with things.
So anyway, that first day, it changed everything for me. I got a bit of respect, ended up growing my hair a bit longer and became very good friends with the guy that I had the fight with. And what about you as a fighter? Were you training as a boxer or was this just an extracurricular activity? So when I started high school, I started to train at a local boxing club, the Gympie.
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