The Expert Podcast

So where are most hidden assets held? You've heard about the infamous Swiss bank account, people hiding money in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, or in South America. Where do most people hide assets? Well, you might be surprised to know, or maybe not because you're looking at the screen, most hidden assets are held right here in the US. Many times clients contact us worried about doing an asset search because they think that the debtor or the hider is hiding money overseas offshore accounts and in most cases we'll tell the client well even if they are offshore we can find them. It's not like it's you have to go there anymore, everything's electronic.
But don't worry, most debtors or Ponzi schemers or scammers don't bother with hiding money offshore because the US is the biggest place to hide assets for secrecy. So don't worry that you have to do offshore searching. Most of our asset searches find the vast majority of assets onshore in the U.S. - bank accounts, real estate, trust, different tax advantage financial facilities. According to the article of investment or investigative journalists, the United States is the world's largest enabler of financial security, surpassing notorious tax havens like Switzerland, Cayman Islands, and Bermuda. According to the analysis by the Tax Justice Network, the Financial Secretive Indexed, the U.S. has the highest score or lowest score depending on how you look at it for financial secrecy.
So don't worry that people are trying to hide assets elsewhere. When we search for bank accounts and we search for other assets, most of what we find is in the U.S. Occasionally we find stuff elsewhere, but the U.S. is where we find it. Partly because there's enough secrecy here to satisfy almost every scammer or asset hider, and even if you could find something slightly better somewhere else, it's much easier to do it in the US. Especially if you're scamming in the US, if you shift it offshore you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to do that, and you have enough protection here in the US or at least perceive protection.
Any assets can be located with enough effort, with enough work. So if you have a case where you have a judgment against somebody or you have a debt owed by somebody and you want to find their assets, don't worry that they can't be found just because they're overseas. Most scammers don't take the steps that are necessary to hide assets. Even if you think they're clever, even if you think they're smart, remember there are large-scale Ponzi schemers and narcotics traffickers that hire hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, and those assets are found with enough time and effort. I think the federal government found Bernie Madoff's assets - billions of dollars. Noriega's assets - major narcotics trafficker in the 80s and 90s, hundreds of millions of dollars. Those assets were found.
So somebody trying to hide 50 grand, 100 grand, even a million or two, they're not going to have the resources to hide assets well enough. They might hide them from consumers that are trying to find them just doing Google searches online, but they're not going to be able to find them from a professional investigator who knows how to search for assets. I'm not talking investigator that does surveillance, look through binoculars and follow somebody around. I'm talking about an investigator or an agency that specializes in asset search and recovery. That's a specialization just like for a doctor - heart surgeon is different than the brain surgeon, and an attorney - a fraud attorney is different from a criminal defense attorney or an ambulance chaser litigation attorney.
Assets create paper trails. You may not be able to find them directly, but you can find the trail that leads you to where they're hidden. You find the footprints to the cave where they're secreted, so to speak. If you're looking for bank accounts, real estate, corporate assets, digital assets, cryptocurrency, a proper asset search isn't going to be thwarted just by boundaries of a country. And in recent years it doesn't matter - they're in the U.S. anyways.
In fact, the harder searches are when somebody is overseas. We get a lot of calls from overseas investigators, especially in European nations, Israel, looking for assets that people over there have hidden in the U.S. It's not going the other way. We get calls all the time from agencies and investigators that are in other parts of the country saying, "Hey, we need to find assets in the U.S. that somebody over here has hidden in the U.S." So it's not like trying to find U.S. money hidden in the Swiss bank account anymore - it's the other way around.
Let us know in the comments about your case. You can reach our website activeintel or arrange for a consultation with an investigator at teleclient.com. Assets are an important part of you recovering a loss, a debt, a judgment, a scam, a Ponzi scheme that's owed to you. If it's your money sitting in their account, you should be getting it back, not trying to argue over whose money it really is. Let us know what you think. We'll see on the next video.