The Expert Podcast

So how is a hidden asset search performed? Well, assets come in many flavors. There's bank accounts, real estate, vehicles, corporate assets, intellectual properties, UCC's - there's all kinds of asset classes and each one is searched separately. There's not one magic button you push a button and everybody's assets pops up. You have to look for them in the record sources. For example, real estate records are kept in the county recorder's office, the vehicle records are kept at the Department of Motor Vehicles, so you have to search each location. Bank account records are kept through the Swift Code system or other ENT type investigations.

An asset search is really just a matter of spending many hours of labor searching through all those record sources, getting the supporting documents, analyzing them to find out what assets are held by the person and if there's any that have been what's called fraudulent conveyed - meaning that they've been transferred to another party to try to hide it from you or that have been put in another nominee trustees name to try to keep it from showing up on an asset search.

So not only do you want to do asset searching, but you also want to look at asset tracing to see if any assets have been concealed. This is very common with judgments of, you know, court litigation, with probate cases, with divorce cases, with even Ponzi schemes where the fraudster is trying to hide your assets from you getting them back.

So if you're looking to do an asset search, make sure that you are getting not just a basic electronic fancy Google search because that's not going to show everything. It's not going to show bank accounts, it won't show real estate, show corporate assets, LLC's, that kind of thing. You want to get a full complete documented asset search if it's really important to have correct and complete information.