Susy Lost $500k from Her Super Balance Overnight and No Longer Trusts the System

Share and Follow

When Melburnian Susy Zjak inherited her mother’s home a month ago, just a few years after losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic, she didn’t think it would be her only security in retirement.

But since losing access to almost all of her $574,000 superannuation balance, the 52-year-old says the house is the only thing keeping her from being “out on the street”.

“I felt like a knife hit my heart,” she told The Feed of the moment she read the email telling her that her retirement savings may not be recoverable.

“I felt dizzy. I just cried. I vomited. I actually thought I was going to have a heart attack. It was the worst nightmare of my life,” the former Qantas employee says.

“This is 30 years of working, 30 years of hard working.”

A woman sits in the window seat of an aeroplane holding up a smartphone in her right hand.

“I pay my taxes, I pay all my bills, I pay everything. And for me to be a victim in this is just not fair,” Susy says. Source: Supplied

Susy is among an estimated 6,000 Australians caught up in the collapse of investment fund First Guardian. A further 6,000 have been entangled in the recent collapses of two other funds: Shield Master Fund and Australian Fiduciaries.

Unlike large super funds, such investment vehicles aren’t regulated by The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, meaning their investors don’t have the same level of protection.

Super Consumers Australia CEO Xavier O’Halloran says the loss of super savings in the collapsed funds “point[s] to a system that is overly complex and people really struggle to navigate as a result”.

“Rightly, they’re putting their trust in people who they see as experts, but unfortunately in these cases it’s turned out that they’re not,” he says.

‘Close to zero’

Susy’s first indication that something was amiss was a 14 July letter from her super platform telling her the First Guardian Master Fund had entered liquidation.

She logged in to the platform’s portal and saw that her balance had dropped from $574,000 to about $6,000.

The letter said members’ account balances would appear “close to zero” until liquidators could provide more details about which of First Guardian’s investments would be recoverable.

However, it also warned that the value of the fund’s assets “may have been overstated in the company’s accounts” and that those affected should expect “significant shortfalls” between the real and claimed values of the assets.

Corporate watchdog ASIC first took action against First Guardian in February this year and correspondence was likely sent to Susy before July, but she told The Feed it was landing in her spam folder, which she wasn’t regularly checking because she was caring for her mother, who had cancer and died in June.

‘They were ringing me every second day’

For many, investment into the now-collapsed funds started with a super comparison service.

Susy called a number that appeared on a television advertisement in early 2022 and was told her current super fund was “very bad”.

For some years she had been worried about the size and performance of her super, she says, and after leaving the airline industry, she had to move her super out of an industry fund.

“I’ve got another 10 years, 12 years, and I can retire. So, I worry about the future, and I took their advice.”

The comparison service advised her to move her super to a fund that could make her over $470,000 better off in 16 years, according to a financial planning document sent to her in February 2022.

“They were ringing me every second day,” she says of the process of moving her super.

“I thought: ‘How wonderful is this for a superannuation fund to call you to help you out?’ Don’t worry about the paperwork … We’ll do everything.”

Later, when she saw her balance had grown from about $395,000 to $574,000 in only a few years, she began “giving out the number to my colleagues, to my friends”.

Now, Susy says her balance “may as well be zero”.

‘Too good to be true’

Like Susy, 37-year-old Christopher Parker was enticed by an advertisement — in his case, one broadcast over the radio in early 2023 — encouraging listeners to seek out higher super returns.

Chris, who lives in regional South Australia, says he understood little about the types of super options he was told about by financial advisers when he called the number listed in the ad.

“This type of thing was just beyond me, and I just thought, ‘too-hard basket’ — I’ll let someone else give me the advice,” he told The Feed.

The advisers presented Chris with a report projecting that he could retire with a far larger balance if he invested elsewhere.

“I thought, ‘Oh wow, this is too good to be true.'”

A close-up photo of a man with long, curly hair wearing a striped collared shirt

Chris says the financial adviser he spoke to “made it sound like it was great, [like] I could trust him”. Source: Supplied

Despite his disbelief at the offer, he was eventually convinced because “everything looked hunky dory”.

“They all seemed legit on paper, their websites checked out, they had the right licences in place to be giving financial advice. So, I thought, ‘everything’s sweet’.”

He says the advisers presented themselves as impartial experts who had simply searched the market for the best deal.

Chris followed their advice and moved 97 per cent of his super into a retail fund that promises clients greater freedom in their investments than they would have in other funds, but without the complexity of a self-managed super fund.

Now, when Chris logs in to check his super balance, only $3,300 of around $140,000 appears to remain.

“That’s about 20 years of my working life, just like that.”

Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) CEO Mary Delahunty told SBS news that “Australians being advised to invest in managed investment schemes should be wary of claims of unrealistically high returns, opaque or excessive fees and overly complex structures.”

“Be wary of investments that sound too good to be true. It’s usually because they are.”

Left in the lurch

Like many others, Chris and Susy are now awaiting the results of First Guardian being wound up and its assets sold to provide those affected with some form of remuneration.

“I’m kind of left in the dark and just got to wait it out and see what happens next,” Chris says.

ASIC suspects those managing First Guardian paid out $40 million to companies to run “marketing campaigns intended to increase public awareness of the financial advice and identify potential clients”.

The fund’s former director, David Anderson, is alleged to have poured almost $70 million into a variety of companies in which he was also a director and shareholder.

ASIC alleges the company “appears to have failed to recognise and manage conflicts of interest”.

Anderson is also alleged to have moved $247 million into offshore companies after learning of the investigation and of using investors’ money to pay off a mortgage on a luxury Melbourne property, according to Federal Court documents cited by the ABC.

Liquidators also reported that the company was the registered owner of a 2023 Lamborghini bought for $580,000 via a bank account controlled by the company but not disclosed in official forms.

A shiny grey Lamborghini SUV sits in front of a white industrial building.

SBS understands the 2023 Lamborghini owned by the fund was auctioned last week. Credit: Slattery Auctions / X

In early July, the Federal Court forbade Anderson and another director from trying to leave Australia, or remove any assets from the country, before 27 February 2026.

ASIC has also cancelled the licence of a group whose employees had advised members of the public to invest in First Guardian.

‘Who’s out there lurking?’

Both Susy and Chris say that, along with their super balances, their trust in the system has plummeted.

“I paid my super because I don’t want to go on Centrelink. I don’t want to be on the government support,” Susy says.

“I don’t even want to go into super ever again. I can’t trust it. My trust, there’s no trust.”

Likewise, Chris once believed super was “locked in for life”. Now, he doesn’t know who to trust.

“I don’t know who’s out there lurking. You can have trusted the company, but then behind closed doors they’ve got all these schemes unfolding,” he said.

A recent survey commissioned by ASFA found most Australians retain trust in super funds, partly because of a sense of security, which the industry peak body defines as “the idea that people feel their money is safe, it’s well looked after, and there’s good things happening with their money.”

ASFA CEO Delahunty told The Feed: “Those Australians should have been able to feel confident their money was safe and ASFA looks forward to the results of ASIC’s investigations.”

ASIC has said that, “due to the scale and complexity of the investigation, we cannot estimate how long it will take.” The Feed understands that liquidators are in a similar position.

“Australia’s superannuation funds, in the overwhelming majority, have a strong track record of good, risk-adjusted returns from carefully crafted diversified portfolios,” Delahunty added.

O’Halloran agrees that “basic [superannuation] products that are available are generally trustworthy; they’ve got lots of consumer protections around them”.

“But there’s a huge risk when people are taken out of those products or advised to leave those products, and there’s nothing to really stop that from happening,” he adds.

“There are carve-outs all over the system. There’s lack of consumer protection all over the system,” he says, adding that Super Consumers Australia wants to see “a system that is a lot simpler for people to navigate, so that they don’t run into this kind of trouble”.

Chris says that, despite his potential losses, he’s aware that “there are people in worse positions”.

A young man with long, curly hair stands next to a miniature train.

Chris says his recent experience has “consumed a lot of my time” and he’s been “losing sleep over it and figuring out, ‘Well, what do I have to do now?'” Source: Supplied

“I’m fortunate to be my age, but I’ve heard some horror stories about some people who’ve just retired losing it all.”

Susy — who isn’t currently working due to a workplace injury that occurred after she left Qantas — isn’t sure what her next steps will be.

“What am I to do now? Nothing. You just sit and wait. Sit and wait for what?”

SBS reached out to various companies named by ASIC in its allegations against First Guardian and sought to contact First Guardian and David Anderson through ASIC-appointed liquidators, but did not receive a response before publication.