Small Caribbean States Selling Passports for an Investment in the Island
We recently came across this news article about the business of selling citizenship and passports in the Caribbean, particularly in St. Kitts and Nevis. Increasingly, in several island states, people are able to buy passports simply by…
2 Reasons Undercover Investigations Aren’t Right for You
The big heavy breathing lead story in the Sunday New York Times this week was about the increasing number of government agencies using undercover operations to detect law breakers of all kinds. The Small Business Administration, the IRS, even…
Medical Records on Facebook? Tread Carefully
While clients who ought to know better frequently ask us to get banking and cell phone records, a request for a medical record is far more rare. All three are illegal for us to obtain without a court order by federal statute in nearly any circumstance,…
North Carolina Man Sentenced to 15 to 20 Years for Securities Fraud
According to several news reports, Walter Reinhardt of North Carolina, pled guilty to 40 charges of securities fraud, common law forgery and common law uttering in North Carolina yesterday. From 2005 to 2009, Reinhardt solicited fraudulent…
Betrayed by Their Own Reflection: Selfies Help Police Catch Criminals
Not one, but two stories of criminals foiled by their own selfies have made the headlines this past week. Tanya Peele, a 26-year-old Atlanta woman, is accused of setting up a fake business account at JP Morgan, then using that account…
Arizona Man Arrested for Landscaping Fraud Once Again
According to KRQE news in Albuquerque, New Mexico, landscaper Gary Mares was busted for fraud once again. This time, he solicited landscaping work on Craigslist, collected large sums of money for the jobs upfront, and then never performed…
Produce Company’s Owner Accused of Hiding Assets and Swindling Strawberry Company out of Millions
Last week, Curtis Harold DeBerry, owner of the Texas-based Progreso Produce Company, was arrested and accused of cheating investors, business partners and banks out of millions of dollars over the past few years. He now faces up to…
We Told You So: Illegal Bank Records Update
Lo and behold, not four days after we wrote our last post on the illegality of obtaining bank records, a postcard appeared in our mailbox promising “statewide bank searches” for under $300. I was intrigued. I thought,…
Why Bank Records Are Usually Off Limits to Investigators
Each week we receive calls from people, many of them attorneys, asking us if we can obtain bank records as part of our asset searching. The short answer is, though we probably can obtain the records, we absolutely will not. Obtaining…
U.S. Authorities Target Cayman Islands in Money Laundering Sting
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch, last month, three wealth managers, Eric St-Cyr, Joshua VanDyk and Patrick Poulin were arrested in Miami and charged with money laundering and conspiracy to launder money on behalf of…
