The Expert Podcast

Fraud has been running rampant in this country for the last 24 to 36 months. In the past couple of years, the percentage of fraud cases has gone through the roof. We're seeing dozens and dozens of fraud inquiries every single day from people who have had fraud committed against them. Usually, it's an asset search, a Ponzi scheme, or some type of probate fraud or corporate fraud. A lot of it is divorce fraud, where somebody is getting divorced and the other person's assets are hidden. But before we get into all that, let's take a look at proof that everybody's doing fraud now. Here's an article that came out about first-party delivery fraud as an inflation driver in the US. Forget about that. One-third of Americans commit the crime. What is the crime? This is basically saying that if you're not a company, you don't have to deal with this type of fraud. But you buy something from a company. Let's say you buy a coffee cup, right? You can order a coffee cup online on Amazon. It gets shipped to your house, and then you file a claim saying, "Hey, I never got here. I never got my coffee cup," and you get a refund, and you get a free coffee cup. People do it all the time. Sometimes they do it with DoorDash, sometimes they do it with Amazon. But the key to this is that one-third of Americans commit the crime, meaning that some of you watching this probably have done this before even though you're not a victim of it. What it tells you is that people are more comfortable committing crimes. You go back 5 years, and probably less than 1% of people would do this. Now that it's considered, well, this is just normal. Fraud has become normalized. How does that affect you if you're involved in any kind of financial transaction with another person? Maybe it's a contract, a partnership, employment, or maybe it's a business deal with somebody, a divorce, or a death in the family where there's a will. People transacting money: anytime money is being moved around, somebody is committing fraud, and it's going to affect you. So, if you have a suspicion that you're getting divorced and the other party is hiding assets, you're probably right. If you have a suspicion that Grandpa Joe died two years ago and somebody's taking the money and not giving it to you that's supposed to be a distribution from the will, you're probably right. If you have a suspicion that maybe, on some business deal, you're not getting everything that's coming to you, you're probably right. In all the cases we investigate, we look back. It's getting to the end of 2023. We look back on the hundreds of cases that we investigated. We only have two out of many, many hundreds that did not discover fraud. It's less than 1%. So, if you have a suspicion that some type of fraud has taken money or assets from you, you're going to be right. The takeaway is to be suspicious, skeptical of everything, and if you think maybe somebody's not telling you the truth, verify it. Have them give you documentation. If you think they're not telling you the truth about money, verify it. If you think they're lying about assets, verify it. It's easy to do. You just get the documentation. Ask them to prove it, right? We have a case where a young woman had a parent die a few years ago, and the stepparent, the spouse, and a couple of other siblings are trying to take the money that rightfully belongs to her, and they gave her a printout of what they say the assets were. But when you look at the printout, the numbers don't even add up. So, don't take a printout unless you can verify it. An asset search and asset tracing are crucial to making sure that you're being told the truth. Use your instinct; use your intuition. If you think somebody's trying to defraud you, you're probably right. And at least you want to have the peace of mind to know that's the case. So, the takeaway is that fraud is running rampant even though on the outside people look the same, and, you know, the economy may be a little messed up, but the world looks the same. Fraud is out there. It's just highly invisible until it smacks you in the face.