The Expert Podcast

We are seeing more and more of these family law fraud cases. A lot of times with what's called estate fraud or inheritance theft, what happens is somebody dies in a family and that person who's deceased has assets that need to be distributed and one family member will decide they want to take more than their fair share. And many times because the process of settling in the estate is not as transparent as you might think, they think that they're just going to go behind the scenes and take money, maybe writing a check, maybe transferring property, and it all creates a paper trail.

But most times the other person thinks they're going to get away with it because no one is going to look. In this case, it says, "My brother divvied up our dad's estate, but I just found something very off. This can't be right." So if you look deeper in all these cases, you will find the evidence of the fraud. A party will steal money from an estate using one of several different methods. A lot of times they just write a check from the account or close out an account.

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They take the money. Sometimes they will get the proceeds of a life insurance policy. Sometimes they'll transfer real estate or a vehicle into their name. There's a number of means people do. What they don't realize is it always can be discovered even after the fact. And if it's discovered after the fact, not only can that transaction be unwound and undone, but there also can be penalties and some consequences for the person who did it.

Anytime somebody's deceased, you want to make sure that you get a good accounting of all the money. You get a good asset search to see what happened with all the financial assets of the deceased person, but also you want to audit what was done to see if there was any what's called a fraudulent conveyance—money that was sent to the wrong place. Maybe some party—maybe in the family, maybe not—did it improperly.

Especially if there is an executor of the estate, you want to make sure that that person abided by the terms of the will, that they did things the way that they're supposed to get done. Because if they send money to the wrong place, they could also have liability. Many times there's co-executors, and sometimes that gets a little sticky because one might have a different opinion than the other.

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