FRAUD RECOVERY ASSESSMENTS – STEPS TO TAKE UPON DISCOVERY OF A FRAUD
Fraud Recovery Assessments are a service we provide to fraud victims on a contingency basis. We do not collect our fee until your funds have been returned to you.
To proceed please complete and return the attached form. Please include the the amount of the loss and where you believe the jurisdiction (city) where the fraud took place.
We welcome inquiries related to corporate frauds, employee frauds, investment frauds, insurance frauds, relationship frauds, and all forms of losses resulting from financial misconduct.
Asset tracing and recovery
Commonwealth's financial investigators and forensic accountants have deep experience in the tracing and recovery of assets, borne of successful careers at some of the largest law enforcement agencies and consulting firms in the world. All financial frauds produce money trails, and Commonwealth's professionals have made careers out of “following the money” and recovering significant proceeds from those frauds on behalf of victims. The ease with which funds can be moved around the world when coupled with the lack of transparency into the true beneficial owners of bank accounts creates unique challenges for each company that is defrauded.
Tracing assets in today’s world isn’t easy, but Commonwealth's professionals have made careers out of “following the money” and recovering significant proceeds on behalf of victims of financial fraud.
But following the money in today’s world isn’t easy; it requires true expertise. Commonwealth's financial investigators, who are experts in asset tracing, work with senior financial crime compliance experts who hail from some of the largest international financial institutions in the world. These experts have decades of exposure to money launderers who attempted to hide proceeds of crime and truly understand the use of complex, offshore shell companies designed to conceal ownership. Collaboration between Commonwealth’s worldwide financial investigators, compliance experts, and an unparalleled investigative team creates a uniquely efficient and effective approach to finding and recovering assets.
Commonwealth’s professionals also have deep experience working in foreign jurisdictions while fully complying with local regulations to identify and recover ill-gotten assets. Our skill set effectively lends itself to both public and private sector clients seeking to identify, freeze, and recover assets misappropriated and/or subject to forfeiture. We also have deep experience tracing assets for clients seeking to assess counterparties’ financial health before initiating potentially costly and time consuming litigation.
Our asset tracing efforts use the expertise of our capable research team, which includes more than 70 full-time researchers operating out of the U.S., UK, Hong Kong, and Singapore, who speak more than 25 languages at a native or fluent level. In fact, our public record expertise is a critical compliment to the asset-tracing assignments that our teams of financial investigators and forensic accountants tackle. Whether it’s mapping out the relevant connections of a subject’s social media network or establishing links through a complex network of overlapping entities, Exiger’s professionals use the latest visualization tools to assist with bringing clarity to these complex relationships.
In addition to research and financial investigation, asset tracing engagements often require insight or intelligence gathered from sources on the ground in jurisdictions around the world. Commonwealth regularly calls on its deep and diverse source network to help provide color and context to issues identified by financial investigators or through public record research.
Once we have identified hidden assets, we turn to the recovery phase. During this phase, we work with our experienced network of lawyers, investigators, and analysts throughout the world to ensure the necessary and legally sufficient steps are taken to freeze the funds, eventually returning them to the victims.
Investment fraud litigation
The crux of most investment frauds is the fraudster’s wholesale abuse of trust and reliance. Victim investors will often place their trust and reliance in the fraudster, for example, due to his convincing representations of having highly regarded professional competence, or due to his representations of having sincere cultural or faith affinities with the victims. Because the fraudster carefully cultivates the trust relationship, victims will often neglect to carry out an appropriate level of due diligence on the fraudster prior to transferring their funds into his control. Furthermore, sophisticated fraudsters often employ the assistance of third party individuals and entities in order to re-convey and “substantiate” the fraudsters’ false representations, and to launder and conceal the victims’ assets.
At Commonwealth, we handle numerous investment fraud claims.
For example, in one of our many successful cases we were able to determine that once the primary fraudster obtained possession of the victims’ funds, he transferred the funds to concealed accounts in the names of shell companies in England, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the Caribbean, and the United States. Through hard-fought tracing orders, we discovered that the primary fraudster had wrongfully diverted the victims’ funds in order to purchase a palatial residence in Southern California, through the agency of yet another offshore corporation. Subsequently, we arranged for lawyers from our legal network in California to obtain a lis pendens order against the property in order to prevent its sale. The fight for the recovery of our client’s investment funds was successful.
LITIGATION ASSISTANCE
Commonwealth offers litigation support and advisory services to corporations, individuals, and in-house and outside counsel in a way that contains costs and increases the likelihood of a successful outcome. Our multi-disciplinary team comprises experts from the top of their respective fields, including former federal and state prosecutors, forensic accountants, former federal and state law enforcement officials, investigative researchers, and digital forensic experts, all of whom have deep experience in supporting clients involved in complex civil and criminal litigation. Commonwealth can assist at every point along the legal
spectrum, from pre-complaint to post-judgment.
Our experts will partner with the client to achieve the return of their funds We will identify key objectives and craft a surgical, laser-focused strategy to achieve those goals. Specific services include the following:
Conducting targeted investigations to develop evidentiary quality facts, utilizing techniques like undercover approaches, human source interviews, and online and in-field surveillance;Investigating and developing detailed profiles of adverse parties for use in depositions, investigative interviews, and trials;Reviewing financial records, and providing expert forensic accounting analysis;Investigating and assessing the backgrounds of proffered experts, both adverse and retained;Identifying and locating assets in order to facilitate post-judgment collection of awards;Identifying, locating, and interviewing crucial fact sources and witnesses;Conducting targeted research and investigations to establish jurisdiction in desired locations; and detecting, preserving, and analyzing electronic evidence.
INVESTOR CLASS ACTIONS
Investment losses are an inevitable part of investing in the stock market. Investors assess the potential risk and reward of an investment in a public company based on publicly available information. However, they do not assume the risk of misleading financial statements, misrepresentations in MD&A, oppressive conduct by directors and officers, insider trading, market manipulation, and professional negligence involving a company’s auditors or professional advisors. Corporate and securities laws are designed to protect investors from losses arising from such misconduct.
Regulators have limited resources – they simply cannot investigate and prosecute all instances of securities fraud and market manipulation and it is not their mandate to seek compensation for investor losses. As a result, individual investors often assume there is nothing that can be done when their losses are small compared to what it would cost them to hire a lawyer to pursue a legal action.
An investor class action can be a powerful litigation strategy to recover your investment losses. By aggregating individual investment losses, an investor class action provides strength in numbers giving ordinary investors a means of collectively enforcing their rights and fighting injustice in the stock market and the corporate boardroom.
An investor class action should also be an important consideration for institutional investors that purport to take corporate governance and ethics seriously. By taking a lead role in investor class actions, pension and hedge funds can reaffirm their principles of responsible investment and send a strong message to public companies, their directors and officers, and other market players that misleading disclosure and corporate misconduct will not be tolerated. In turn, they will encourage greater transparency and accountability and better protect their clients’ interests.
Commonwealth can provide knowledgeable, timely guidance and representation in investor class actions and assist in the recovery of investment losses. We welcome your inquiries.
FINANCIAL INVESTIGATIONS AND FORENSIC ACCOUNTING
Commomwealth’s global network of forensic accountants and financial investigators provides the coverage and expertise necessary to address the complex challenges facing our clients in a world of ever-evolving fraud schemes. Our experts have spent years “following the money” globally to solve complex frauds and disputes, and they understand the importance of in-depth analysis of documents from multiple sources to inform investigative findings. Whether the matter involves internal and external fraud, regulatory and law enforcement scrutiny, or FCPA/UK Bribery Act matters, our experts have the depth and breadth of experience to find answers efficiently and effectively for our clients.
Commonwealth's experienced forensic accountants and financial investigators conduct and advise on a wide range of investigative matters, including:
AML and money laundering investigations;Analysis of bank transaction records on behalf of financial institutions and other companies involved in regulatory proceedings; Asset tracing and recovery;Audit Committee and other Board of Director investigations;Anti-Bribery and Corruption investigations, including violations of the FCPA and/or UK Bribery Act;Construction fraud;Internal and external fraud, bid-rigging, embezzlement, and kickback schemes;Responses to law enforcement and regulatory scrutiny;Quantification of damage amounts and financial analysis;Reconstruction of financial transactions;Securities, commodities, and investment fraud; and verifying compliance with contractual requirements.
Commonwealht’s forensic accountants and financial investigators honed their skills at the FBI, the UK Serious Fraud Office, and some of the world’s largest international accounting and consulting firms, among other organizations. In those roles and at Exiger, our team members have conducted hundreds of complex financial investigations. Importantly, Commonwealth’s professionals pride themselves on conducting investigations with rigor, precision, and strict attention to detail – all of which are critical to analyzing key issues for our clients. The result is trusted client relationships and effective outcomes.
Our clients also have the benefit of Commonwealth’s long and varied experience working for and interacting with domestic and international regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies (the Department of Justice, UK Financial Conduct Authority, the Federal Reserve, and financial regulators in the U.S., UK, and a number of other countries around the world) to better inform our clients of regulatory expectations and methodologies. Commonwealth’s professionals are not only experts in forensic accounting, but are also highly regarded in the fields of financial crime compliance and due diligence. Many of our team members have native language capabilities (in-house facility with 25+ languages), and a number are experienced former federal and state prosecutors.
Our varied, multi-disciplinary backgrounds when combined with the use of advanced data analytics allow our team to quickly and surgically analyze disparate sources of information to uncover critical insights and unearth hidden connections, thereby producing the results that our clients demand. Part of this package is our ability to use the data that has been analyzed by our forensic accountants to conduct detailed interviews to further contextualize the evolving fact patterns.
DUE DILIGENCE IS FRAUD PREVENTION
While Fraud and Debt Recovery Litigation is the focus of our firm, Due Diligence Investigations are a service we provide to businesses, institutions and individuals to protect our clients from falling victim to fraud. In almost all cases of investment or relationship fraud we investigate, it is apparent to us that had a due diligence investigation been undertaken prior the victim proceeding with the transaction, the fraud could have been prevented.
The Due Diligence Process
At Commonwealth, we commence our due diligence investigations by reviewing client documentation and information to identify flags of fraud. We then conduct standard public record searches on the persons or issues identified. This procedure is standard practice of most investigation firms or lawyers providing due diligence services. Our value added over and above what other investigative agencies or law firms typically provide is inquires made through our networks into their databanks. Through our networks we also conduct covert and overt interviews and gather intelligence utilizing other covert and overt methods. After our initial investigations are conducted, we are often asked by our clients to meet with the proposed parties to the transaction for the purpose of gauging their credibility against the intelligence we have on them. At these transaction meetings, our clients usually advise the parties that we are their counsel there for the purpose of assisting them assess the proposed transaction.