Litigation Support – White Collar Fraud Investigation – Corporate Fraud Investigation
1Don’t waiver from your ethical core values.
2Don’t impersonate another human being.
3Don’t do anything that is illegal or something that falls within the “grey area” of legality.
4Your reputation and your word are all you have; use them wisely.
5Don’t take on anything just for the money.
6Situations dictate tactics.
7If you are uncomfortable with your client’s intentions, don’t take the case.
8Don’t say or do anything that your mother wouldn’t be proud of.
9Assume nothing; question everything.
Yesterday, I was messing around with some online tools to identify social media profiles and came across Followerwonk, a tool created by the folks over at Moz to analyze Twitter followers. They have a tool where you can search Twitter bios by their “real name” or by keywords in the bio.
It’s quite a handy tool, and it turned out to be fruitful for a case that I was working on because I found a few Twitter profiles for a person I was looking into.
As I often like to do, I like to test out these tools on myself. So I tested it out on my own name and found my profile (@b_willingham), but to my surprise, I found a second profile for Brian Willingham with my old profile photos and my personal bio. This profile had 64 tweets and 12 followers. But as I looked into the profile more carefully, I saw that the spelling of the handle was off by a letter (@b_willingahm instead of @b_willingham), and the location is listed as Pico Rivera, California. The other Brian Willingham retweeted on topics ranging from Brexit to Tommy Hilfiger, Donald Trump and English soccer.
I probably should have been a bit more freaked out, but I was more amused by all of this.
What was this person trying to accomplish? Why would anyone want to impersonate me on Twitter? Whom did I piss off to deserve this?
I’m not really sure, to be honest. This could have been as mundane as someone just playing a joke or had the much more nefarious motive of trying to steal my identify.
But I was determined to try to figure it out.
Report it immediately. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram all have ways of reporting fake profiles.
In my case, I reported the account to Twitter late Monday, January 29, 2018; as of the date of the posting of this article, the account had not been taken down. [Update: As of Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 9:51 AM, the account has been suspended.]
At this stage, I would conduct a thorough analysis to see what the person has done.
Who have they communicated with? Have they tried impersonating you in communicating with others?
In conducting a deep dive on the posts, I see that it’s probably just a spam account, a rampant problem in social media, especially on Twitter, where an estimated 48 million accounts are reportedly designed to simulate real people.
Out of 11 followers, only four were not spam accounts. Of the four non-spam followers, three were confirmed to be fake (created one letter off from the real user, just as mine was). All three fakes had the same modus operandi – mostly retweets, and many came from the same people (Mark Beech, Young Hollywood, Expert April Masini). Their original tweets all came in clusters from the same time period, none of which had any likes, comments or retweets.
From what I saw, there really was nothing that could potentially hurt my reputation.
This might surprise you, but absolutely nothing.
Here’s the thing. As a person who mines information on social media for a living, I know that I could spend dozens of hours trying to track this person down, but at the end of the day, without any real harm committed here, what’s the point?
“Aren’t you curious?” you might be thinking. Sure, but I have bigger fish to fry.
Besides, I know that given the information provided, the likelihood of tracking down this person is pretty small.
With a little know-how, anyone can set up a fake profile in a just a few minutes that will be almost impossible to trace. And although Twitter may have some information that will help track this person down, like an IP address, cell phone number, email address or physical address, they are not going to give that out without some type of court order. And without any real harm done, no court is going to do anything here.
The best I could have hoped for is some sort of slip-up on Twitter, but no such luck here.
*UPDATE* After contacting Twitter, the fake account has been suspended.
In about four minutes, you can set up a fake Twitter account, anonymous Instagram account or a private Facebook account. There has been some talk about social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter confirming that there is a real person behind every account. In reality, however, that will probably never happen.
At this point, there really is no way of preventing someone from impersonating you online (that sentence is kind of scary). About the best you can do is to monitor the web for anything that might have your name.
You can either manually do this by Googling your name every so often, or you can can set up an automated service like Google Alerts to notify you anytime your name comes up on the web. If you want a bit more advanced capabilities, Talkwalker is another service that offers notifications, but with more features, such as boolean operators.
Another thing to consider is doing a reverse image search on your profile photo every so often (there is no automated service for this feature that I know of). You can use either Google Image Search or Tineye to see whether your image is coming up on any other websites or social media sites. (Personally, I have had much more luck with Google Image Search.)
Although my situation turned out to be pretty benign, I can imagine plenty of situations where this might be more serious. In such cases, you should contact an attorney, reputation manager or a professional for help.
After 15 years as a private investigator, I have become an expert in finding people. Long-lost relatives, hard-to-find witnesses, biological fathers, ex-boyfriends – you name it, I have found them.
I don’t say this lightly either. I think that people who call themselves experts at anything are idiots. So I guess I am breaking my own cardinal rule.
But after hundreds of cases in which I had to track down people nobody else could find, I realize that I am pretty darn good at it.
How do you become an expert in finding people?
Get lots of practice. But here are a few more tips.
Finding people has its limitations, and before you even get started, you need to know your limits. I get inquiries all the time from people who from across the pool saw someone on vacation with a few drinks in him or her, and they think that someone should be able to track down that person with a sketch and the hotel name. It’s just not possible.
If you don’t have a name, the city they live in and some semblance of details about their lives, it’s just not possible.
I subscribe to dozens of professional-grade investigative databases, including TLO, IRB and Lexis Nexis, that contain millions of records. In my toolbelt, I’ve also got hundreds of other free and paid databases, including Ancestry.com and Archive.org, and some not-so-secret techniques to mine social media. Quite often it takes a combination of multiple tools to nail people down.
There is always that slim chance you may find that difficult-to-find person with a few Google searches, but more often than not, you are going to need some serious database horsepower and some creative juices.
It’s important to gather as many pieces of factual information as you can about the person you are looking for. Where he or she lived, when he or she was born, age, date of birth, schools attended, street the person lived on, places he or she worked, businesses he or she ran, and parents’ and siblings’ names. Even old friends, neighbors or former spouses can be helpful. You never know what may help.
It’s also critical to separate fact from fiction. For example, you may have an incorrect spelling of a name. You may end up “down in rabbit holes” because you were told the person went to Harvard University, but he or she really went to Hartford University.
While most information can be helpful, some information, such as hair color or the size of the tattoo on an ankle, is not.
If there is one takeaway here, this is probably the most critical: becoming an expert in finding people is about understanding the resources that are available to you. There are millions of data points of public records and open-source records – from college yearbooks, professional licenses, old telephone books, property records, military records, legal records or archived websites – that can help you find someone. Each of these sources may be helpful in tracking down the person you are trying to find.
Of course you could pay some sketchy source to get you hotel records, boat manifests, passport records or sales receipts, but then again, you are more than likely breaking the law.
Finding people is time and resource intensive. There really is no way around it. If it were easy, there would not be an entire cottage industry of people who do this for a living. A few taps on the computer are just not going to get you there.
By the time a search has gotten into my hands, our clients have Googled themselves to death and taken it as far as they can go with the tools they have. Be prepared to either spend lots of time and resources of your own or to pay for someone else to do the same.
Last week, I read Eamon Javers’ article on BuzzFeed about Tom Corbally, “a private investigator whose career crisscrossed continents and spanned decades.”
It’s an absolutely fascinating read. It’s literally a story straight out of Hollywood. Corbally was the “original most interesting man in the world.” He rubbed elbows with Hollywood types, flew on corporate jets for vacations with automotive legend Lee Iacocca and, on one occasion, at a horse race in Paris, he was whisked into box seats with Middle Eastern royals. He even reportedly spotted the diplomat Henry Kissinger in a New York restaurant and greeted him as an old pal, saying, “Henry, how the fuck are ya?” He also became a close confidant and client of “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss.
While I read the article with complete awe, I was struck by how different my life as a private investigator has been. Although even some of my closest friends think I have some secret spy life, I spend most of my days sitting behind my computer digging through the darkest areas of the Internet. I’ve never rubbed elbows with diplomats, flown on a corporate jet or befriended anyone running a high-class prostitution ring.
While Corbally lived in another era, today’s age of social media makes it seem that meaningful lives are extraordinary and attention-grabbing ones. In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, Emily Esfahani Smith argues: “The most meaningful lives, I’ve learned, are often not the extraordinary ones. They’re the ordinary ones lived with dignity.”
It’s OK that you are not going to be famous.
Or have some remarkable and glamorous career.
Or do something so extraordinary and attention-grabbing that you will end up in folklore like Tom Corbally.
In my short career, I’ve done some really fascinating work on some really high-profile cases. But I have no interest in rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, mayor of New York or pitching in a national advertisement for a turkey club.
And my life will never end up being the subject of a Hollywood movie, I can assure you of that.
That’s not what I want.
While I am a private investigator and want to be the best private investigator that I can be, I am first and foremost a husband, the father to two amazing kids, a sports junkie, and a lover of all things food-related.
The private investigator gig is just something that can allow me to live an ordinary life and be the best husband and father I can be – and maybe take me to a few sporting events and eateries around the world.
We have recently been working on a case for a California-based firm in which we are conducting a number of in-person interviews. In this particular case, we are interviewing individuals who may have some knowledge of a fraud involving upward of several hundred million dollars.
As my colleague and I were driving around the New York metro area (which has nine of the nation’s worst bottlenecks) and sitting in hours of horrible traffic, I got to thinking about the effectiveness of in-person interviews and whether they really bring more value to the client than telephone interviews do.
One hundred percent of the time, it is always preferable to conduct an interview in person. In a perfect world, you would call up the person of interest, set up an appointment for a specific place and time, meet the person in a neutral area, and conduct an interview with two investigators — one asking questions, the other taking notes.
Perfect worlds exist on television but not in reality.
Or at least not in mine.
In our line of work, an in-person interview is what we like to describe as a doorstep interview, which is showing up at someone’s home or business unannounced to conduct an interview. It’s not the ideal situation, but a private investigator would utilize this tactic for a number of reasons.
First, you don’t want to give the person an opportunity to think too much about the reason why a private investigator is standing at the door asking questions or to wonder whether or not they should speak. It sounds a bit deceitful, but I assure you it’s not. The reality is that if given the choice, most people just don’t want to be involved, or they are afraid they might say the wrong thing. But despite what people may think of private investigators, my only interest is in the facts, good or bad; it doesn’t matter which side I am working for. My experience has been that the more time you give a person to sit and think about why they should speak, the less likely it is the person is going to want to talk.
Second, an in-person interview gives the person a level of comfort. You might think the opposite, that showing up unannounced at someone’s doorstep might freak the person out. But in my experience, quite the opposite is true. People are more comfortable putting a face to a name.
Building a rapport with a person is also critical to successfully interviewing the person, and you have a much better chance of quickly building rapport in person than you do over the phone. In about 95% of the cases that we work on, the person I am speaking to has absolutely no compelling reason to speak to me or cooperate, unlike when being questioned by the police (or other governmental authority) or other authoritative interview (employer/employee). My ability to build rapport and trust and provide a compelling reason why they should speak to me is critical to having a successful interview.
All things considered, a doorstep interview is the best way to handle any investigative interview, but the biggest problem is that it is enormously time- and resource-intense. And there is that possibility the person may not be home, which is just a total waste of time. Doing an interview at a person’s place of employment is not recommended unless absolutely necessary.
Also, technology has made the world much larger; so you may have to do in-person interviews in New York, California and France, which require either extensive travel time and resources or getting multiple investigative teams up to speed. [It’s always best to use one investigative team to do the interviews to avoid involving other investigative teams lacking institutional knowledge about the case].
In sum, in a perfect world, in-person interviews are ideal, especially in situations where a few key witnesses/individuals may make or break the case; but they are enormously time- and resource-intense.
There are a number of advantages of conducting telephone interviews. First and foremost, it is much more efficient and less resource-intense. A private investigator can sit behind a desk, utilize proprietary databases to find telephone numbers of former employees or witnesses to an accident who have been found through discovery, social media or resume databases, and make phone calls from the comfort of his or her desk. An investigator can potentially make dozens if not hundreds of phone calls in a day and work through a long list of potential leads.
Telephone interviews have no bounds, so I can call people all around the country or the world. And I don’t need a second investigator, because I can easily take notes while conducting the interview, or in some cases, I might record the interview if I get the person’s permission — or if state laws allows, I may record the conversation without his or her knowledge.
(If you are looking for a digital voice recorder [affiliate link], Amazon has number of high quality voice recorders starting at around $25. If you want to record a conversation through your computer, Pamela for Skype [affiliate link] is a great tool that I have been using for years with great success.)
The reality of any investigation is that you never know who is going to be helpful to your investigation. It could be anyone, from the janitor to the secretary to the CEO. Or from the best friend to the eighteenth cousin, once removed.
Because it does not take nearly as much time and effort to contact people by telephone, my list of “people of interest” might expand to others on the periphery. Whereas when conducting an in-person interview, you don’t want to waste precious time and resources trying to interview someone who may have no helpful information, but calling that same person might take all of a few minutes.
Telephone interviews do have their disadvantages. First, fewer and fewer people are answering their phone these days, especially calls from blocked numbers or from numbers that they don’t recognize. It’s also getting harder and harder to identify good telephone numbers as well, which makes it challenging to get in touch with people in the first place.
It’s also a bit more difficult to establish a rapport, so you may not get as much information as you hope or want on your first interview, but you can combat that by following up with other telephone interviews or scheduling an in-person interview at a later date.
Telephone interviews are ideal in cases where you have the potential for a large pool of witnesses or leads, or cases where you are gathering information from a wide group of sources.
Nine times out of ten, I would tell a client to conduct telephone interviews first, and if any interviewees are particularly helpful/meaningful, I would follow up with an in-person interview to get a signed statement. The exception would be extremely sensitive or high-profile interviews of a short list of witnesses.
In my own personal experience and the experience of the group of investigators I spoke to, in-person and telephone interviews have about the same success rate with people willing to speak to you; so from that point of view, it’s a bit of a wash.
This should all be taken with a grain of salt, though. This is entirely based on the type of work that we do, which tends to float into the white collar world.
You can ask my friend Hal Humphreys of Find Investigations, who does a lot of criminal defense work, and he may tell you the opposite.
In the end, it really depends on the type of work and your (or your client’s) appetite for utilizing your time and resources. As investigators, we bill by the hour, so from a pure efficiency standpoint, I would typically recommend telephone interviews.
What say you?
There are several reasons why law firms, businesses and individuals aim to hire the cheapest private investigator possible.
It makes perfect sense.
Why would you pay $1,000 for a background check when you can do one online for $50 for what appears to be the same thing?
Or why would you pay one firm $225 per hour as opposed to $100 per hour for another firm? After all, you can get more than twice the work per hour from the cheaper investigator.
But what if I were to tell you that the $225-per-hour firm was able to get the result you were looking for in less than an hour’s work, while the $100-per-hour firm had taken weeks to do the same job?
An attorney client called a few weeks ago looking for some help in a legal dispute. He needed to track down two critical witnesses and interview them. Our longtime client was working with another partner who had his own investigator, but was hoping that we could assist as well, based on some work we had previously done for him. Ultimately, the other partner decided to go with the other investigator because he was a former police officer and charged half the hourly fee that we did.
On both points, I totally respect their decision, although I have said this on the blog before: police officers don’t necessarily make better private investigators. But I digress …
With regard to the fees, I understood. After all, it’s hard to argue that hiring someone to conduct a pretty ordinary request such as locating and interviewing a witness or two would require paying twice the fee. It’s more understandable when you have a complex matter with moving parts. Besides, one of the people they were trying to track down had such an uncommon name that it couldn’t have been that difficult to find him. But, as with nearly every case that we receive, nothing is really “ordinary.”
Three weeks later, the client called me back and said that he was having a “surprisingly” difficult time tracking down the guy with the really uncommon name. The client authorized us to spend a few hours looking into it.
Within an hour, we found the guy with the uncommon name, his cell phone number, home address and his “real” name. Turns out the name he commonly used was a nickname.
The client was thrilled. Three weeks of work by the cheap investigator was completed in less than an hour by the expensive private investigator.
But that’s not the only lesson here. I can tell you countless other stories.
Like the $50 per hour investigator who was tasked with making some human intelligence inquiries in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, only to come back more than a month later with an unintelligible report and little useful information.
Or the time when that cheap online background check came back sparkling clean, only to find out later that the person was actually a convicted felon who has been arrested six times.
Or the potential client who balked at hourly fees when they could pay $75 per hour and get three times the amount of work — only to crawl back to us weeks later when the other investigator couldn’t find anything.
Is hiring a more expensive investigator always better? Absolutely not. But there are reasons why some firms command a higher rate. After all, there is not much of a market for firms that charge astronomical rates and consistently fail to deliver results.
When your sole focus is price, you are missing out on the big picture; the end game is to have a successful outcome, not spend the least amount of money.
Cheaper is not always better, BUT better is always cheaper.
In the summer of 1972, after seven years of running a successful business importing running shoes from Japan, Phil Knight was about to release Nike shoes to the world. The National Sporting Goods Association show in Chicago was going to make or break Knight and his fledgling company.
Despite their cool “swoosh” logo (which they paid a local artist only $35 to create), a unique company named after the Greek goddess of victory and bright orange boxes of shoes that stood out from the crowd, they had crooked logos and completely flawed shoes. With everything riding on these shoes, panic set in among the employees attending the show.
But a funny thing happened. As the buyers came through the Nike booth, peppering the employees with questions, they bought the hell out of the shoes, flaws and all.
One of the longtime salesmen asked one of their biggest accounts what was going on.
“We show up with this new Nike, and it’s totally untested, and frankly it’s not even all that good – and you guys are buying it. What gives?”
The man laughed. “We’ve been doing business with … you guys for years,” he said, “and we know that you guys tell the truth. Everyone else bullshits; you guys always shoot straight. So if you say this new shoe, this Nike, is worth a shot, we believe you.”
“Telling the truth. Who knew?” said the longtime salesman.
[Note: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike is one of my favorite business books of all-time!]
If there is one thing I have learned in the past eight years of running my own private investigation firm, it’s that this business is filled with bullshitters.
Trust is a funny thing. It’s earned. And unfortunately for our business, we haven’t done ourselves a whole lot of favors.
So can you trust a private investigator?
Absolutely! As much as you can trust anyone else.
But there are some types of investigators that I would be particularly wary of.
There are very few firms that have actual employees around the world. Hiring subcontractors in different parts of the world is a common practice and totally acceptable, but lots of firms like to pretend that they have people standing by the phone in any part of the country or world waiting for a call.
The reality is that you can’t be great at everything. And if you really think that you are good at everything, you are kidding yourself.
So, would you rather hire a firm that was mediocre at a bunch of things or great at the one thing that you need them for?
I know whom I would rather hire.
What did Benjamin Franklin say more than 200 years ago? There are only two things certain in life: death and taxes.
In this business, there are no guarantees. Investigators can guarantee that they will seek answers in the best possible way they know, both ethically and legally, but there are no guarantees that they are going to find that witness, force him or her to talk and have the person sign a statement of confession. Firms that do resort to guarantees may resort to illegal, unethical methods to ensure their “guaranteed” results.
Phil Knight got his multibillion-dollar business started based on honesty and trust; if you are looking to hire a private investigator, it may behoove you to look for those qualities as well.
In the summer of 2013, we received a call from a local law firm with what appeared to be a simple request – they wanted to determine the identity of the owner of a property in the Hudson Valley of New York, where hordes of wealthy New Yorkers had been collecting property over the past several years. Seemed like a pretty simple request, given that real property information can usually be gathered from the comfort of a computer. But it was anything but simple.
It’s rarely straightforward.
It became clear quickly that this was not so straightforward. First, the law firm had done a bit of their own digging around. The law firm suspected that the ultimate owner of the property was a wealthy foreign businessman with a history of shady business deals. When you are dealing with shady people, it’s rarely straightforward.
Second, based on some initial research, the client was aware that the property had been acquired by a New York limited liability company (LLC), which had only the name of an attorney associated with the firm. It’s a common practice for a wealthy family to purchase a home through a corporation with the only point of contact being an attorney instead of their own names, for privacy reasons. But if you are a shady businessman, it’s also a nice way to protect the true ownership of the property.
Since the property records were not available online, we went to the local county clerk to review the records relating to the property transaction. We reviewed hundreds of pages of documents and determined that the attorney who set up the LLC signed all of the property documents as well.
We also found that no mortgage was filed on the property, which suggested that it had been purchased in cash. It’s not unusual for an attorney to sign on behalf of an LLC and it’s not really unusual for wealthy families to pay cash for a property. But we did note that it’s very difficult for foreigners to get mortgage financing. Certainly not proof that the property was owned by a foreigner, but certainly a clue.
Next we visited the real estate agent who brokered the transaction. While he was polite and I charmed him as much as I could, he refused to give up the details citing confidentiality. It was kind of expected, as any real estate agent worth the paper their license is printed on would never provide that information to a stranger. Especially ones who count on wealthy New Yorkers for their business.
But I guess I charmed him enough that he gave me a few small clues, like the owners were from out of the country, that the transaction was “complicated” given that it was an all-cash transaction, and that funds had to be transferred from accounts “overseas” from “multiple institutions.”
The plot thickened.
Information obtained under false pretenses may not be looked upon so kindly by the courts.
We next took a ride by the residence. To our surprise, we found that there was a significant amount of construction going on at the house. While we could have probably come up with some ruse to get the construction workers or the architect to talk about who owned the property, we knew that this was going to end up in litigation and needed more than a statement obtained under false pretenses.
So we went to the local assessor’s office to see if they had permits for the ongoing construction on the property. And what do you know? After taking the time to review all of the applications, permits and site plans, we found the true “owners” staring right back at us. We found a real property transfer report, which showed that the suspected husband and wife had signed the property transfer document, and the same couple had signed two active building permits identifying them as the owners.
Information obtained under false pretenses may not be looked upon so kindly by the courts (just ask Uber), but a piece of paper filed in the local assessor’s office showing the owners of the residence?
Priceless.
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