On August 19, web developer Jacob Siew made a WhatsApp video call with a stranger to arrange leasing his extended family’s vacant rural property in Sunbury. He didn’t know it, but he was about to make the biggest mistake of his life.
Siew, who lives in a leafy outer suburb in Brisbane, agreed to lease the modest lifestyle block on Melbourne’s north-western fringe to a man identifying as Zack Milan. Siew claims Milan told him he wanted to keep horses and host family picnics on the acreage, which is on a secluded road within earshot of the Calder Freeway.
Siew soon learned Zack Milan was an alias for a man named Ali Said, whose criminal history includes being jailed in 2025 for vehicle theft and dangerous driving while being pursued by police.
Within weeks, the grassy property Siew co-owns with four overseas relatives – grazed by kangaroos and crossed by an ephemeral water course – had been covered in mountains of construction debris. An excavator had dug multiple large holes in the ground, which were now filled with industrial waste, mostly from demolished homes.
High-tech drones deployed by the Environment Protection Authority detected the presence of asbestos among the refuse, necessitating a costly and complex clean-up. Siew now fears his error could cost him close to $2 million and financially ruin his family.
He says he has been unable to contact Said since learning that the property had become a large-scale dump site.
When contacted by The Age, Said acknowledged he had leased the property in August and that he had been issued a clean-up notice by the EPA this month, but denied he was responsible for any illegal dumping. He said he brought the excavator on-site to try to clean up the colossal piles of waste.
“The land was dumped on before I rented it, and was known for people to come and put stuff there,” he said. “I was going to have a hobby farm for the kids, a nice weekender for motorbikes and go-carts. It’s all backfired in my face. I honestly don’t know what to do.”
The brazen operation, which neighbours say mostly took place late at night under spotlight, is one of a spate of apparently organised “rent-to-dump” schemes seeking to profit from the illegal disposal of industrial waste across Melbourne’s fringes.
The practice has been likened to the black market tobacco trade, driven in part by successive annual increases to Victoria’s landfill levy, which have pushed up the cost of industrial waste disposal, and spurred rogue operators to open tip sites under the noses of the public, fill them, then move on before the environmental regulator takes action.
In neighbouring Diggers Rest, less than 10 minutes’ drive from Siew’s property, 71-year-old retiree and grandmother Suji An has had a similar experience after leasing her hobby farm on June 25.
The two men told her that they would store a small fleet of trucks on the property for their plumbing business, keep horses in the back paddock, and promised to mow the grass, An says.
Within four weeks, the 15-acre property had been covered in almost 400,000 cubic metres of industrial waste. Scores of demolished houses were disgorged in long rows by hundreds of tip truck drivers, who paid as little as $1000 in cash to dispose of their loads.
Three months after the lease was signed, the mountains of rubbish remain untouched on An’s despoiled property, with no word on when or how they might be removed. EPA’s orders to clean up the site for letting dumping occur as a tenant have been ignored.
An, who contacted the police, her local council and the EPA about the dumping within one week of leasing her property to the two men, has been told she is ultimately legally responsible for the monumental clean-up.
She says she has also been informally quoted anywhere between $600,000 and $2 million for the task, depending on whether the industrial waste contains asbestos.
In both the Diggers Rest and Sunbury cases, the EPA did not act to shut down the black market tips while they were operating, instead launching enforcement action after the sites had been heavily polluted.
An argues the EPA only leapt into action once the damage was done.
She says she contacted the EPA about the dumping on her Diggers Rest property in early July, days after a neighbour tipped her off about rubbish piling up there, pleading with them to shut down the operation while it was still “confined to a small, isolated section of the backyard”.
Instead, an EPA investigator told her by email on July 14 that a site visit would have to be co-ordinated with police to protect staff health and safety, and that arranging this “may take a few weeks before an outcome can be produced”.
The EPA ultimately made its first inspection of the site on July 30, four weeks after being alerted by An. According to its entry report, seen by The Age, their authorised officers found an area covering about 9960 square metres – larger than a soccer pitch – covered in “multiple stockpiles of industrial waste”.
The inspection found potential breaches of environmental laws which could result in a sanction.
An took it upon herself to confront some of the tip truck drivers at her property gate while the dumping was happening, taking photographs of vehicles and their licence plates in a desperate attempt to compile evidence, and even convincing one driver to show her a text message on his phone, advertising her place as a “temporary tip”.
“I’m by myself, so yes it [was] very scary, but you know, what else can I do? The EPA doesn’t do anything,” she said. “Over 20 [trucks] come to my place every day, I say ‘please send someone immediately’, they say it’s under investigation, but they send nobody at all. I have no choice. I have to do something, you know what I mean?”
The EPA also issued An’s tenant a clean-up notice with a deadline of August 17, which has long since expired without action.
Under Victoria’s planning and environmental laws, An is ultimately responsible for any illegal dumping on her land, even if she is not the perpetrator.
In a statement, the EPA warned landowners looking to rent acreage on Melbourne’s fringe to be wary of “rent-to-dump” schemes including those “who falsely state their purpose for renting a property and instead use it as an illegal waste dump site”.
“People considering renting acreage, particularly sites on the city fringe, should make sure they know who their prospective tenants are and not to become victims,” the EPA said.
“Landlords, through no direct fault of their own, could be left paying the cost of the clean-up if a tenant leaves behind a potential environmental hazard and either absconds or cannot meet the costs themselves.”
Neither the council nor the EPA has issued An with a clean-up notice, though An says a Hume council officer handed her an excerpt from the Planning and Environment Act, which states that the owner of any land that is used in contravention of a planning scheme or permit has committed an offence.
She says that if the council or the EPA ever moves to enforce a clean-up notice against her, she would be incapable of paying.
“I cannot afford that. This property is worth $1.2 million, without the rubbish. To remove the rubbish could be over $1.5 million. That means if I give my property away, I still have more to pay.”
The Age attempted to contact the tenants by phone but neither man responded.
The Diggers Rest operation, which is being investigated by the EPA and Hume City Council, began less than a week after the EPA and the council combined with police and firefighters to shut down a similarly large illegal rubbish dumping and burning enterprise on a property in the neighbouring suburb of Wildwood.
Hume City Council chief executive Sheena Frost said the council understood and shared the community’s frustration with illegal dumping and deliberate damage to land, which creates unacceptable burdens for landowners and residents.
But she said the council’s powers to respond to illegal dumping were limited.
“Where we have the authority to act, we will,” Frost said. “However, council’s powers are limited by the current legislative and regulatory framework that governs these matters. Council’s response is often constrained by required planning and regulatory processes, which can limit the speed and scope of enforcement action.”
The council has previously said it spends more than $4 million of ratepayers’ money every year cleaning up illegally dumped waste.
The EPA said it had an active formal investigation under way in relation to the properties in Diggers Rest and in Sunbury, but that it was limited in what it could say to avoid risk of prejudicing the integrity of the investigation and any possible future court proceedings.
“EPA has taken regulatory action in relation to the [Diggers Rest] site, including issuing notices requiring that no further waste be accepted and requiring action to address waste already present,” a spokesperson said.
“EPA will continue to use its regulatory powers as appropriate to manage environmental issues at the site while the investigation progresses.”
The issue of illegal dumping took on extra political significance this week. One Nation invited the media to An’s property on Monday to launch a policy to increase fines for offenders, while the Carroll Labor government announced it is using advanced drone technology to catch offenders in the act as part of its $21.5 million illegal waste dumping taskforce.
Associate Professor Brad Jessup, an environmental law expert with Monash University, said Victoria’s illegal dumping crisis was driven in part by a legal system that targets landowners heavily but is comparatively lenient on perpetrators.
“There is no real imperative on the regulator to make sure that the person who commits the crime does the time, essentially because of the way that our hierarchy of responsibility in environmental law works,” he said. “The ultimate responsibility always lies with the owner of the land. At law there’s no real division between who the wrongdoer is and who the property owner is.”
Jessup said that in cases such as An’s and Siew’s, it is most likely the landowners will eventually have to relinquish their properties, at which point the responsibility for clearing the dump sites will pass to the state.
“I’m guessing what they will ultimately be required to do, if forced to clean up, is to just give the land back to the state and it becomes a state liability anyway,” he said.
Victoria has increased the landfill levy every year for the past three years, to encourage recycling and discourage sending materials to landfill.
Jessup said the successive increases had spurned an unintended incentive to dump rubbish to avoid paying the levy, and created a black market industry in the illegal disposal of industrial waste.
“This is the illegal tobacco trade before the illegal tobacco trade happened,” he said. “We knew this was going to happen. The state proceeded with this fiction that people would reuse or recycle material. We know that, particularly in the construction industry, that’s just too difficult for the construction industry to do. And so they now have these informal arrangements so that the waste can’t be traced to them.”
Siew says his late father bought the Sunbury property several years ago, hoping to leave an inheritance for his family, and that it has been unoccupied for several years. The land is zoned for future residential expansion.
He says he advertised for a tenant on Facebook marketplace earlier this year, hoping for an income stream to offset some of the land tax and vacant owner surcharge on the property, which has been unoccupied for years.
Within a week of leasing the property, he got a call from the EPA, telling him Fire Rescue Victoria had attended the property in response to reports of burning rubbish, possibly containing asbestos.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy continued accepting more rubbish after the first complaint, and it just snowballed from there,” Siew says.
“Even though the EPA has told him to stop what he’s doing, I think he’s just ignored and kept on going.”
Siew said he had been deceived by Said.
“So obviously, he’s not going to clean up, so eventually the responsibility will fall on the landowners,” Siew said. “That would be me and actually, not just me, but my family. I’m expecting the clean-up bill to be around $2 million, probably more, I don’t know. It’s really distressing.”
Monash University’s Jessup said criminals behind the rise in illegal tips had calculated that the money to be made exceeds any possible penalties, as evidenced by a court judgment in August in which offender Mohamed Sadek was fined $10,000 for dumping on public land, while Whittlesea City Council was left with a $3 million clean-up cost.
“We know that the kind of fine that results from this behaviour is much lower than the financial benefit of engaging in this behaviour. They know that,” Jessup said.
“That is not a secret and that is why it’s happening; they’ve done their maths. The consequence is a $10-15,000 fine, but they make that in a day. So if you’re inclined to this behaviour, why would you not?”
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