The Expert Podcast

If you have been a victim of an online scam or online fraud, you probably are wondering, "What do I do now?" If you sent somebody thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars and you're starting to either suspect or be sure that it's a scam—it's a Ponzi scheme—you lost your money. You're probably at a loss: What do I do now? You're maybe scared.

Well, here are the four steps that are part of a fraud investigation and recovery of lost funds. There are four things that happen in this order, and they have to happen all of them in this order. Otherwise, you'll never get your money back.

So before we get into those four steps, first make sure that you've reported this to the FBI or IC3. Make sure that you don't send any more money, and make sure that you don't send any more private information—like you don't give people copies of your license, or your credit card, or your bank account—to these scammers. Make sure you lock that down, and if you feel like your personal safety is at risk, take appropriate methods there, maybe with law enforcement.

But once you've reported it, look, don't expect that the FBI or IC3 is going to drop everything and jump on your case. They don't do that, and it's not their fault. It's not that they're inept. It's that they're more interested in larger crimes. But if you do log it into their system, if for some reason this Ponzi scheme or fraud turns out to be a much bigger thing and they clamp down on it—even two, three, four years from now—at least you'll be recognized as a victim of that scam.

But what do you do in the meantime? Well, if you want to, you can take these steps in order to do a fraud investigation and recovery. All of these have to be done.

Number one: you have to identify the actual true party—identification of the scammers. They use fake names, they use fake emails, fake phone numbers, even fake addresses. Now look, we've covered this in videos before, but there's a new wrinkle now with filing the legal documents that maybe will make it easier for you, so stay tuned for that.

So as we've talked about before, step one is you have to identify who it is. You can't recover money from somebody who you don't know who they are. That money's in a bank account somewhere, it's in crypto somewhere, it's existing in some account. Unless you know who it is and what the account is, good luck getting the money—you can't grab it from an unknown place, right? So you have to identify who they are.

Next, you need to asset search that identity. So if it's a company, if it's a person, if it's a group of people, you need to find out what the location of their assets are: bank accounts, crypto platforms, real estate, cars—whatever all their assets are. Don't leave any out. If you just say, "Well, I just want to look at their bank accounts," these people might sweep their accounts every day and leave nothing in there because they know that you're looking for them. They might shift their crypto around so you know you're looking for them. They don't leave cash. People who are scammers use the cash for something. They buy real estate. They buy vehicles. They spend it on other assets. They convert it to other asset classes. You have to find those. Because if you're just relying on offline, the bank account might be nothing there—might be—but you have to accumulate all the assets everywhere.

That's step two: asset search all of them. And for more details on how to get this done or instructions to do it yourself—or if you want help from us to do it—check out our website. We can do consulting, we can do the search for you, we can do all kinds of stuff. But check out the website Active Intel and you'll get more information about these steps.

Here's step three. This is the important thing. Once you find out who the actual identity is—no matter what country they're in, if they're in the U.S., if they're overseas, if they're in Europe, if they're in Eastern Europe, if they're in Asia—you need to find out who they are. You need to find their assets: bank accounts, crypto, vehicles, real estate—whatever they are. Corporate assets. Before you can go grab those assets, you can't just walk into a bank.

Let's say they keep their money in HSBC and say, "Hey HSBC, this scammer stole my money, give it back to me." HSBC is not going to give you the money. Bank accounts are protected. You can't go in and rob a bank at gunpoint and say, "Give me their money." You can't hack into a bank account. Bank accounts are highly protected. Crypto accounts are highly protected. Real estate—you can't just grab somebody's real estate based on your say-so. Who the heck are you to tell the bank that their customer is a scammer? They don't know that. "I got emails. I got text messages." That means nothing.

You have to have a formal document authorizing the bank to do it—not only authorizing, but forcing them to do it. Good news for you is: there is such a document. It's called a writ of garnishment. Now remember, we're not attorneys. We're not giving you legal advice. We're not trying to pretend we're a law firm. We're investigators. But this is a legal process. You need to have a writ of garnishment from a legal authority that directs that holder of the asset—the bank, the real estate clerk, the titling authority for a vehicle, the crypto platform—that forces them, directs them to disgorge the assets and give it to you.

Without that document, you have nothing. You could find a bank account with 20 million dollars in it. Without some legal authority that you give to the holder of that asset that makes them give it to you, you got nothing. And you never will have anything.

Don't be fooled by people who advertise, "I'm a hacker. I'll get the money. Send us twenty thousand dollars and we'll get your money back. Send us ten thousand." It doesn't work that way. Assets are protected. Because if a hacker could just steal any money they wanted by you giving them ten thousand, why would they need to get your ten thousand? Why wouldn't they just hack into the bank account and keep the money for themselves?

Think about it. If this scammer has a million dollars in the bank, and this hacker, so to speak, has the ability to go into that account and just take the money out on your say-so, why do they need your ten thousand? Why don't they just do it and keep the money, right? It doesn’t make any sense.

The reason that we say that is there are lots of companies in all different countries of the world that advertise, "Hey, we'll get your money back. Scam recovery." And they charge huge upfront fees. Huge upfront fees plus they say, "We'll take a percentage." Well, unless they can explain to you very clearly how they do it, you have to think it's another scam trying to take more money out of you.

Why do these companies advertise? You've already been proven to be susceptible to being a victim of a scam. You've already demonstrated that you could be talked into giving money for a good story. Hate to say it—we're not trying to talk badly of you. These people are skilled. They're slick. They're clever. They know exactly what to say. They know exactly how to promise big returns on your investment. They know exactly how to work the language. They do this hundreds of times a day. They polish it.

Watch the movie Wolf of Wall Street. They have a script. They know how to talk on the phone. They know how to talk by email. They know how to use the Jedi mind tricks on you to get you to send them money.

Let me guess. You sent them some money. Then they sent you a big statement that said, "Hey, you sent us eleven thousand. Congratulations, your account now has twenty thousand because it went up in value. If you send us ten thousand more, we'll make it go to fifty." Oh yeah, here's ten thousand more. You send them ten thousand. They show you now an account with fifty thousand in it. Wow, I'm making all this money.

"Look, accounts that are over six figures—over a hundred thousand—as a balance automatically get double returns. So if you send us another fifty on top of the fifty you already have, you'll go from a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand." Oh my God. You get caught up in the ether. You get caught up in all the excitement and the profit and the greed. So you send them another fifty thousand.

And at some point, you might get a little skeptical or you might want some of your money, and you'll tell them, "Look, I want to take my money out." "Well, now you have to pay taxes. Now you have to pay an audit fee. Now you have to pay a commission." Sound familiar?

These are the techniques that they use to get you to send more money. They make up any excuse they want. They'll keep making up excuses to get another five or ten or twenty thousand dollars out of you—just to keep the suction going of your money. They know what to say.

The scammers who promise to get your money back know what to say to you too. How do you determine who's a scammer, who's not?

Well, start by finding out how legitimate they are. Do they have a license? Investigative agencies in almost every country are required to have an investigator license. Don't take their word for it. Look it up. Have them tell you their license number, where it is. If it's in the U.S., it's issued by a state. If it's in other countries, it's issued by the federal government. Look up their license. Are they licensed? If they're not, what does that tell you?

Look up their address. Do they have a street address that's an actual office, that's a physical location—not just a mailbox? And you want to verify that too. We've seen some companies that put down, "Hey, our address is 120 Broadway in New York City." Well, make sure they're actually in that building. They didn’t just look up an address on Google Maps.

There's a way you can do that for about 20 or 30 dollars—to verify that a company is in a location they say they are. You can check out our website how to do that. If you're going to send somebody twenty thousand dollars, thirty thousand, at least spend 20–30 bucks to make sure that they're actually in the place they say they are.

Check out their phone numbers. How long have they been in business? Check out their website. How long has it been there? You can go back in time and look at the historical presence of a website using Wayback Machine. You can see what that website looked like five years ago, ten years ago, three years ago. If the website didn't exist up until 60 days ago, you know you have a problem.

Because scammers can't leave a website around for too long because they'll get bad reviews, and people say, "Hey, this place took my 20 grand and they're no good." They just open up a new website—looks good, very flashy, slick, good pictures, stock photos of executives. Right?

Verify that. Because we've seen so many times—somebody lost a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars on an investment and then lost another twenty thousand to some proposed or supposed investigator that's going to get their money back. Doesn't work that way.

Make sure it's for real. Certainly, there are legitimate investigative agencies. They have licenses. They can tell you how they're going to go about doing this. They're legal. They're professional. They have an office. We're an example of that—but we're not the only one. There's plenty of places that can do it. Make sure, though, that the agency you deal with specializes in this, that they know what you're talking about.

Look, you can talk to somebody on the phone for five minutes, and you know if they know what they're talking about or not. We offer even a 20-minute video…