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Why Your Investigator Should Have a Sense of Humor (Seriously)

In a partially hilarious, partially disturbing article this week in The Wall Street Journal, “Facebook Has No Sense of Humor,” the Editor in Chief of the satirical website The Babylon Bee related that two patently ridiculous “news” stories…
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The Small Business Landlord-Tenant Wars Have Begun

The big guys have been going bankrupt, but the real carnage is yet to come:. Among America’s small businesses. Potential creditors need to get organized for the fight which appears to have been kicked off in New York this month with a fascinating…
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The Changing Face of Privacy for Investigations

We always like to say that when we find out about a person, we do so without invading their privacy. That can still mean we find out a lot of things about them that they would rather keep secret, but those facts are derived from what we can…
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President’s Day Thoughts on Interviewing

In honor of President's Day (still officially known as Washington's Birthday) a few thoughts about interviewing. There are so many more facts about ourselves that are in our heads (or the heads of people we know) than there are in databases…
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When Databases Fail Us

There is a widespread belief among lawyers and other professionals that investigators, armed only with special proprietary databases, can solve all kinds of problems other professionals cannot. While certain databases are a help, we often…
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That Bank Account Information Your Investigator Got? Probably a Crime

Half the time when someone calls our office about asset identification they tell us, “I need bank account information.” When told that without a court order there is nearly no legal way to get that kind of information from a bank without…
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The Jeffrey Epstein Lesson in Overseas Asset Searches

We’ve written here many times about how tough (i.e. slow and expensive) it can be to track down overseas assets. In short, you need to be going after serious money to make it worthwhile, and you can often get clues to the location of offshore…
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How to Improve Your On Line Security (Even if People Know Your Phone Number)

The New York Times published in interesting piece this week that was among its most popular: I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have. In it, the paper’s personal tech columnist Brian X. Chen explained how much information people…
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Tracking Kim’s Mercedes: It’s All About What’s Not There

Not for the first time, the most compelling piece of information in an investigation is what isn’t there. We’ve written often before about the failure of databases and artificial intelligence to knit together output from various databases…
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The Bumbling Spies of Black Cube: Lawyers Beware

If you haven’t seen the amusing and disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal this week about Black Cube, the band of former Mossad (Israeli secret service) agents, it’s worth a look. The article explains that Black Cube’s people run…