The Expert Podcast

this is Dave at active Intel investigations were license investigative agency in one of the areas that we specialize in as a practice area is online fraud in online scams. what happens is there are hundreds if not thousands of scammers who collect money from victims under the pretense of having some type of an investment that they're putting money into maybe real estate or stocks or coin. sometimes it's a scam where their purchasing inventory or purchasing some type of goods that never arrive. in many cases the scam has a affinity relationship to it where they're collecting victims from some group maybe it's an online group sometimes it's a social group. either way a lot of victims send hundreds or thousands of tens of thousands of dollars to the scammers. a lot of times the form is untraceable such as Walmart gift cards or wire transfer cashier's checks. in many cases the scammers identity may appear to be obscured. so what are the steps to recover losses from an online scammer well the first thing to do very quickly is to save and protect against future losses. and you have to act very quickly to start collecting the information on the scammer the longer you go with taking action the farther away the scammer can get. the reason why is these scammers don't keep the same entity or the same website or the same operation for too long because the word will get around online words spread quickly if X. Y. Z. corporation is a scam that will be easily searchable and discoverable in reviews or in Google. so they're gonna change their operation quickly usually in a matter of weeks or months. so we want to make sure you take action quickly on the steps for recovering your losses. the next thing I wanna do is identify the actual parties behind the fraud. and there's information on our website about doing this and there's steps that can be taken to do this. the website itself may have fake names fake email fake phone numbers but there are actual people behind this operation their actual identifiable humans with addresses with locations with names social security numbers they can be identified so you know who actually perpetrated the fraud. a lot of times the corporations themselves aren't even real corporations they're made up names and there's no such entity filed with any secretary state around the country. the third thing you have to step three is to search the assets. once you've identified the actual parties the names of the individuals or the corporations find out what assets they hold real estate vehicles bank accounts corporate assets even things like retirement accounts. you want to identify what assets these individuals have so you'll know where to search it to recover your losses at a later date. searching the assets is very important also want to start the claims process. so if this is going to go through the court system or through legal system or through enforcement by government agency want to start that process while you're searching the assets. step four very important you want to start having forensics performed. things like IP addresses if you have mobile phone numbers for these perpetrators you want to start doing forensics on the mobile devices to find out who they're calling the emails the locations that they may be using on their GPS. so that way you'll have that forensic information retained so you can use it for the final step which is the garnishment. you want to actually collect your funds once you've established a losses started the claims process you know where the assets are now you want to recover and seize these assets. many times this is through a legal process like a writ of garnishment or court judgments. sometimes it's done through enforcement through a government agency but you can't do that process unless you've identified the parties involved and identified the assets in done some forensics on the activities so you can connect all of those in that process of garnishment to say party a did this this is how they did it this is the activity the messages the activities the locations and here are where their assets are. their bank account at bank of America has forty two thousand five hundred dollars in it and I lost eight thousand five hundred and you're gonna garnish that amount so you have to have all those ducks in a row before you start to garnishment process. in many cases you'll need some qualified legal advice if you're using the court system. you may be able to have government agencies that are doing enforcement handle some of the heavy lifting but the more information you can provide them the more data or forensics you can have them on a silver platter the faster that process will go. government agencies enforcing fraud or criminal actions go ponderously slow. many times it's gonna take months or years for this to happen so the more information you can give them to make it easier the better it will go if that's the the method of doing the recovery. but those five steps act quickly. don't let it go too long because these people disappear. identify the party search their assets do the forensics on all the electronic and messages records voicemails email so you can trace the pattern of activity and then do the garnishment. again may require legal process. if you have any questions or need assistance on any of the steps you can reach us on our website activeintel.com. we have expert investigators to handle these types of frauds on a regular basis it can assist you with any one or all those steps as part of our main practice areas. there's been many many clients who have had losses recovered using these steps small amounts and large amounts this is the proven method to get your money back when the scammers are fraudsters taken under false pretenses.