The Expert Podcast

One common question we get in investigations from the client is: Can they call the police if it's a fraud case, an embezzlement case, or some kind of online scam? Can they call the police? Should they call the police? Are the police going to do anything? In general, fraud against a person is a crime. If somebody improperly takes money from you or steals money from you, technically, in most jurisdictions, that's actually a criminal offense. Maybe a misdemeanor, maybe a felony, depends on the jurisdiction.
How can you get the police, law enforcement, or some other government agency involved with your case? That would be ideal, right? If a government agency got involved, they would handle your case. You don't have to pay anything; they just take it over, and they do the work for you. In reality, most of these could be filed as police reports. The question is, is anybody going to do anything about it? Whether it's the police, the FBI, the district attorney, and so on,.

In most jurisdictions, there are either public or non-published restrictions on taking financial cases. Some states look at it like it's a civil matter. If you have a dispute against somebody where they defrauded you or took your money, they're going to say you need to sue them in court. Some jurisdictions will have the ability to have criminal prosecutions endeavored; however, they may have a threshold or a limit. Unless it's over 2 million or 3 million, they might not get involved.

Sometimes it depends on whether there's any physical harm involved. Was it a robbery? Was it a home invasion? That's a different story. In practical terms, if you go to your local police department to report a crime that is like an online scam or fraud or embezzlement, more than likely they are going to discourage that report from being taken. They might say you have to file in the jurisdiction where the other person is, or they might say it's a civil matter. Sometimes they'll take the report, but in reality, detectives in a police department are not going to drop all their cases to work on an online scam or fraud case, even if it's 100,000 or 200,000.

Many of the cases they work on are more intense in terms of the results. It may be something about physical harm. You know, there's murder cases, carjacking, that kind of thing. It's not that the police are bad or they don't want to help you; it's just that they're very understaffed. Police departments, like every government agency, are underfunded, understaffed, and overworked. There's a lot more cases coming across their desk. So what do you do in that scenario where you have a case that you would like to have prosecuted? Maybe it's just a matter of principle or spite. Look, that person stole your money. You want them to see their justice. You want that person to face the consequences of their actions.

That's fine. If you do want to increase the probability that a district attorney, a police department, or some other agency will be interested in it, you have to give them more than just your word or a vague description of it. Look, you know your case inside and out. You went online, and you sent $1,000. They asked for more. Eventually, you sent $882,000 to this person, and you got defrauded in cryptocurrency, bitcoin, or some other online scam, and they didn't send your money back. You know your story, and you know your case. Even if you recite that case to the police officer, they're not going to know it as well as you do. And of course, they don't have the time to really look at all your records and documents to know if what you're saying really rises to the level of a crime. You know, it probably does, but they have hundreds and hundreds of victims coming to them every day with similar stories. They just don't have the time to find out which ones are worth chasing.

However, if you bring them a complete case file with all the proof, I'm not just talking about screenshots of your text message, the proof that it was a scam, or the identities of the people. That's important because if you are doing some type of online investment that turns out to be a scam, many times the names, addresses, and company names that are used by these people are false. They're not the real identities of these scammers. The police don't have anything to go on there. They could certainly find it out. Look, if that person was an axe murderer, they'd find out what screen name Joe Schmo 123 is, right? They would be able to figure that out, but they're not going to go through the trouble of doing all that for some alleged financial scam, right?

So if you can have all that, hand it to them on a silver platter. Police departments and district attorneys love wins. They love prosecutions. They like their case ratio to be successful in prosecutions. So if you bring them everything they need, all they have to do is file it. That's a different story. You might have a higher probability of getting the case taken if you have everything handed to them on a silver platter, literally. Not just your records; your records show what your perception is, not the whole case.
The other thing you can do is show a demonstrable pattern where you have other victims or other stories that match it up, where you have not just one victim but 20 or 30 people that all have documentation. Again, don't just call them up or email them and say, "Here's what I have." Put everything together very well. And your definition of organized might be different than the police department's, right? Most people just have a pile of stuff or a batch of emails. Sort them out, put them in different categories, and make some kind of official-looking report so that the police department takes you seriously. You're not just somebody who was too stupid to avoid being a scam victim, right? They want to help you, but they want to have some ease of processing. Again, not because they're lazy or because they're doing a bad job; they have thousands of cases to pick from. They can maybe pick five that they have the time to work on.

And you might think that if you pay your tax dollars, they should do it. They just don't have enough manpower to go around. We'll do a quick run-through of some stories just to prove that point. In Austin, police are urging robbery victims not to call 911. Robbery in Dallas requires online reporting instead of 911. And some of these crimes are pretty serious: auto theft and mail fraud. alone, they help residents call 911. Now this is the Fourth of July. Portland warns people not to call 911 unless they're at risk of death. There is a risk of death if you call 911. And in Austin, somebody else had an editorial that said, Will the police even answer the phone? In some cases, we're seeing police departments that don't even answer the phone.