HOW TO DO FINANCIAL ASSET INVESTIGATIONS: A Practical Guide for Private Investigators, Collections Personnel, and Asset Recovery Specialists

This comprehensive text explores the practical techniques for financial asset investigation. It steers private investigators, collection specialists, judgment professionals, and asset recovery specialists in undertaking information collection in a legal manner. This new edition remains the predominate primer on how to find assets to satisfy judgments and debts, but it now also includes a significant focus on the emerging underground economy. New chapters cover individual and enterprise involvement in the emerging “shadow” financial domain. This includes the new world of “smartphones,” prepaid cards, carding operations, and electric money laundering. The text explores the connections between stolen credit card information, the gambling sector, money laundering, and the role a subject may play in a larger criminal enterprise. A new chapter also discusses organized crime’s impact on the Internet and financial transactions in cyberspace. The book also addresses the impact of portable digital devices on civil and criminal investigations and the new challenges for investigators working through this electronic labyrinth. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction and objectives and ends with a helpful summary. Significant Internet and electronic sources appear in the tables at the end of chapters, as do useful forms provided for gathering, organizing, and analyzing data. New also to this edition is a glossary that defines terms introduced in the text and an appendix that provides a checklist for traditional and nontraditional asset investigations. Financial investigation is a fascinating subject that continually yields new information, and this fourth edition seeks to provide an understanding of the digital forensics and mobile digital technologies for the asset investigator's toolbox of the twenty-first century.