The Expert Podcast

So one of the questions we get a lot in our investigative division is how easy is it to find out someone's financial status and many times this comes from a need to satisfy a court judgment or a claim against another person sometimes it has to do with a fraud recovery where somebody's been a victim of some online scam or online fraud sometimes it has to do with some other life event like a divorce a death in the family sometimes there's a business dispute between parties in a contract and you need to find out the financial status of the other party so one of the most common types of investigations is this type of research an asset search or financial resources search.

The way it's done is by looking at three different categories of finances one is assets what are the wealth holdings of a person they could be bank accounts they could be vehicles they can be real estate corporate assets intangible property like trademarks patents copyrights even things that aren't filed sometimes are valuable like if somebody has valuable logos websites those are all assets so that's the asset category.

The second category is debts how much does somebody owe do they have liens do they have judgments do they have a lot of back taxes owed are there lawsuits and claims against the person that could result in debts are there car loans mortgages second mortgages those are all reductions of value that a person may have against their personal net worth.

The third category is income and even if a person doesn't have assets but they have a high income that could be valuable to know about for a potential plaintiff or creditor in fact the opposite sometimes is helpful if you know a person does not have income but has a lot of assets that can be helpful as well each one of those types of financial category resources is subject to investigation we can do an investigation that will determine income sources and income amounts you can do an investigation that can determine liens judgments debts mortgages loans ucc filings against a person you can also do a search for assets which will discover bank accounts real estate vehicles vessels aircraft and other assets.

The important thing in performing these type of searches is to make sure that the methods are done properly and legal because there are methods of finding out somebody's bank account by just hacking their email and finding out their bank login there's methods of determining income by pretexting the employer calling up the employer and pretending that you're the person and saying hey what's my last paycheck amount those are all illegal not only can you not use that information for any court purposes or or legal purposes or government purposes if it's discovered that those methods were used which it usually is it can come back as a liability to the investigator who did it or even the client who allowed it to happen so you want to make sure that the methods are correct.

What are correct methods well there's a couple federal laws that govern this there's the graham leach biliac glb there's the fair credit reporting act that prohibits improper access of credit information like you don't want somebody just checking out your credit but there are legal methods and circumstances to perform these types of searches all of them can be searched and finding out the financial status of a party many times is not only helpful but crucial to the outcome of a court case or a legal case or even pre-litigation research.

If you want to know who you're up against in court an investigation might give you the insight to know this person has no assets so it's not worth chasing or they have too many assets and you don't want to go up against them because they have 10 million in the bank and they're going to spend thousands on legal fees where you may not want to spend that much to fight them even if you could win put your comments below let us know what you think or what other questions you have about this subject or others so that we can create some video answers for you in the future.