The car pulls up alongside a teenager walking a suburban street in Meadow Heights, and an organised crime figure leans out the window. “Hey, bro, wanna make some money?” That is how a firebombing starts, with a youth barely into their teens recruited directly off the street by a stranger offering cash, sometimes as low as $200, to set fire to a car or burn down a shop or restaurant, or to stage a carjacking or home invasion.
Over the past decade, arson attacks across Victoria have soared nearly 75 per cent to 3600 incidents a year in 2026 from a record low in 2021. In the past fortnight, police and fire services have grappled with more than 23 firebombings on cars, shops and homes. Police have warned that some of these children have had no prior contact with the justice system before being convinced to commit arsons, abductions, carjackings and home invasions. Two legal sources say more than half the young people fronting court under Victoria’s new “adult time for violent crime” laws have had no previous contact with police.
At the heart of the surge, police and underworld sources say, is a “crimetasker” or “crime-as-a-service” ordering system that has emerged since late 2023. At its most sophisticated, The Commission, the organised crime gang behind Melbourne’s “tobacco war” and “bar wars”, operates a bespoke, secure phone-based app modelled on the odd-jobs contracting app Airtasker. Jobs, including firebombings, robberies, drive-by shootings and murders, are commissioned anonymously by high-ranking figures and accepted by senior players who run crews. The jobs are then passed down a chain that often ends with teenagers recruited by Oliver Twist-like “Fagin” characters. The app self-erases after 24 hours unless a code is entered, and negotiations move to private encrypted channels.
The Australian Federal Police, in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into Combatting Crime as a Service, described the system: “Different individuals or subgroups handle specific, discrete tasks, dividing the risk and responsibility, creating a chain of contractors and protecting higher-level actors while exploiting those at the bottom.” The AFP added: “This process creates a cycle where vulnerable or unsuspecting individuals are drawn into a larger criminal enterprise.”
At street level, communications with the young arsonists run through free encrypted apps such as Signal, WhatsApp and Threema. On Thursday, Victoria Police issued a public appeal to identify online anonymous “handles”, Onepercent, Motion and Work, used to recruit mainly teenage offenders. Detective Acting Inspector Simon Pengelly said: “Tasking criminal offences while hidden behind an online platform is not a faceless crime. Arsons, extortions, kidnappings and other violent criminal offending is being used to intimidate, influence and impose and is putting the Victorian community at risk.”
Police intelligence, tendered in court, shows would-be arsonists receive detailed instructions on targets and how to run jobs, but never why. One criminal in his mid-20s was contracted to do two arson jobs and three drive-by shootings between July and October 2024, paid between $10,000 and $20,000. None of the targets were connected and there is no discernible motive. In conversations recovered from a seized phone, a shot-caller known as CASPA told contractor Jonah Vaivao, UM@GA, that a “client” would pay $15,000 for an arson attack on a retailer. Vaivao was sentenced last week to eight years and six months in prison for four charges of discharging a firearm, two charges of arson and several theft and weapons offences. The shot-caller’s identity remains a mystery.
The disconnect between those ordering attacks, those contracting them out and the young people carrying them out has made the arson attacks difficult to stop, police say.
Children recruited to carry out arson attacks have suffered serious injuries. Law enforcement has classified a number of the latest firebombings as mistaken-identity attacks. “These people are not rocket scientists. They go off bad information, they don’t check. It means innocent members of the public are getting caught up in this,” a police source said. Arson Squad Detective Inspector Chris Murray said offenders being “crime-tasked” often have little or no understanding of who the intended target is.
A source familiar with the recruitment system said teenagers are promised top-notch lawyers if caught, but that it never happens. “Instead, it’s: ‘If you talk, we’ll kill your entire family’,” the source said. Once in, it is nearly impossible to get out. “There’s a day of reckoning when they try to get out. They’re told: You can’t believe you’re going anywhere. You’re doing more jobs for us. Don’t ask fucking questions,” a police source said.
Victoria’s Commissioner for Children and Young People, Tracy Beaton, said criminal gangs groom vulnerable children through gaming platforms and encrypted apps, using mechanisms to maintain control so it is hard to find a different pathway. Monash University youth justice researcher Associate Professor Susan Baidawi said crime gangs use children to shield themselves from prosecution and expand networks. She argued Australia needed to mirror the UK’s public health model rather than a justice response: “We have, to date, primarily been trying to use a criminal justice approach to increase penalties for adult exploiters, to increase penalties for young people for certain types of offending. But it’s easy to see that that isn’t going to be preventing these activities, that there are only responses after the harm has occurred.”