Valuable Garbage: It’s Not Just in the Trashcan
A fascinating piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about a Japanese collector of North Korean garbage got me thinking about the value not just of garbage in a normal investigation, but to take a minute and to ask, ‘What is garbage?”
First,…
Four Ways to Evade the New Treasury Rules on Luxury Property
There is much less than meets the eye in new Treasury Department rules aimed at tracking “secret buyers of luxury property,” as the New York Times put it this morning. When you look at the new rules here, you see that it will fall…
The First Mistake was Calling it a Science
There is a sad piece in the Wall Street Journal today about the demise of librarians and university programs in library science, In the Age of Google, Librarians Get Shelved. People trained to run computers do not have the training to gather…
Social Media: Great Intelligence Right There in the Open
It has emerged that the woman who with her husband shot 14 people to death in San Bernardino, California had posted her support of violent jihad on social media even before immigrating to the United States. As reported in the New York Times…
The Spokeo Lawsuit: Databases Are Riddled With Errors
Spokeo and other low-cost or free information sites on the web spew out a lot of garbage, and that can do a lot of harm. This blog takes no position on whether a private right of action exists under the Fair Credit Reporting Act even when no…
Prenup Vehicles Offshore Can Contain Marital Assets Too
One of the core principles of good investigation is to assume nothing and start looking from scratch. We have found a lot of money over the years hiding in plain sight: in new companies named after old companies in neighboring states, or even…
Getting Around Ban the Box Laws the Old Fashioned Way: Interviewing
Ban the Box isn’t going away, and companies need a strategy to protect themselves. The movement in the U.S. to restrict the kind of information employers can look for in making a hiring decision gathers momentum, this time in New York…
Three Lessons for Investigators from the FIFA Scandal
These are still early days for the scandal engulfing world soccer, but in the indictments and other stories emerging we see three distinct features crucial for most successful investigations. We have written about all of them, but rarely are…
Be Your Own Charity Investigator
News this morning of a Federal Trade Commission civil fraud case against four “cancer” charities in Tennessee is a good time to highlight a wonderful investigative tool out there that we have been using for years. Based on the fact…
The Ethical Case for Neutral Third Party Investigators
How independent should an independent investigator be? The cover story in this month’s American Bar Association Journal called “The Probers” takes a look at some of the highest profile independent investigations of recent years…
