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, and 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 pop up. You have to look for them in the records. For example, real estate records are kept in the county recorder's office; 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 fraudulently 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 trustee's 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 court litigation, probate cases, divorce cases, and even Ponzi schemes where the fraudster is trying to hide your assets from you and get them back.

So, if you're looking to do an asset search, make sure that you are getting more than 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, corporate assets, LLC's, that kind of thing. You want to get a full, documented asset search if it's really important to have correct and complete information.