The Expert Podcast

A subject we've been talking about for many years is now starting to hit the mainstream news, and that's probate fraud—family internal theft. My brother drained $200,000 from my mother's savings. How can I stop them? This is happening more and more within families, even beyond just divorce cases. Obviously, in a divorce case, you may want to hide money from your soon-to-be future spouse, the ex-spouse, because you probably don't really like them that much. But in a family where people are going to see each other on Thanksgiving, family reunions, or what have you, you might not think it's a good idea to steal money, but it's happening all the time. People are stealing money from their own relatives. They're draining bank accounts, and when somebody dies, they're diverting assets so they don't get covered in the probate. It's an epidemic of fraud within families, and people have no shame anymore. They're just taking money that belongs to somebody else within their own family.

The reason they're doing it in a probate case is because they have access to the money. Look, it's going to be hard to steal money from your neighbor because you don't have access to their bank accounts. But in a probate case or a family case, you're going to be familiar with those parties. You may have access to their checking accounts. You may, at least, know where the accounts are. You may be able to forge checks. You may be able to change beneficiaries. This is something that's out of control. If you have any type of suspicion within your family, if somebody's deceased, a divorce, or maybe even just somebody's managing finances and they're not doing it right, make sure you get good accounting forensics, asset searching, and asset tracing to make sure that all the money is where it's supposed to be and no one's artificially taking advantage of somebody in your family.