What are fraud investigations?
Fraud investigations can be complex. This article explores what’s involved in a fraud investigation, the types of company capable of conducting an investigation and the pitfalls to watch out for.
Fraud investigations
Fraud investigations occur when a party has been knowingly deceived by another party in to agreeing a transaction that is fake.
In other words, the opportunity does not exist or will not honour the transaction in the manner agreed. In such cases fraud investigations gather evidence in support of the claimant with the aim of bringing those guilty of committing fraud to justice.
Fraud is big business
£6,000 is lost to fraud every six seconds in the UK alone – it is big business. The scale of reward and lack of prosecution provides criminals with, in cases, a license to print money.
A perfect example in today’s digital world is cryptocurrency fraud. Although cryptocurrencies have been in circulation for over a decade they are still not (in the vast majority) regulated by a centralised authority or tracked by a formal institution.
Criminals use highly sophisticated means to extract your money, frequently posing as official organisations to do so and will manipulate flaws in the financial system to launder their money – quite ironically by laundering their proceeds via cryptocurrency exchanges.
What ever the circumstances, anyone that has been subjected to fraud needs to have the confidence that their interests are being taken seriously and are being meaningfully guided towards a legitimate means of recovering their money.
What ever the circumstances, anyone that has been subjected to fraud needs to have the confidence that their interests are being taken seriously and are being meaningfully guided towards a legitimate means of recovering their money.
Criminal infrastructures
Fraud is often committed by criminal organisations with the resources to front credible investment opportunities and the connections to launder money.
Due to the complexity of criminal infrastructures investigations may span across multiple countries, hundreds of bank accounts and a multitude of fake organisations.
The criminal web is designed so intricately it can span across several legal jurisdictions weaving an ever changing line of investigation resulting in a countless number of dead ends that ultimately drains an authorities resource and/or the will to pursue a claim.
Who can conduct fraud investigations?
Many companies offer services to conduct fraud investigations. Unknown to many however, such companies sell their investigation services based on information gathered from publicly available records.
This results in investigations being conducted based on just 14% of actual information that is available. This lack of data means that claimants instruct companies to recover their assets based merely upon assumption or at best, probability.
Investment Fraud conclude fraud investigations by obtaining more than 90% of available data. We achieve this by having unprecedented levels of access to government agencies. Our sole aim is to provide people who have lost money to fraudulent activities with an official service that finds those responsible, brings them to justice and delivers a means of recovering their money.