Where do you start in deciding which investigator to hire for a sensitive job?
It should be a business of trust, just as it is when choosing someone to come up with an estate plan, to sue a former business partner, or to handle a complex tax situation. Despite the
Specializing in financial investigations as we do, I am always fascinated when new financial frauds come to light, and I always want to know how the person got caught.
In the case of the recent Yale School of Medicine fraud in which an administrator took more than $40 million in fake computer purchases (desbribed in
We were asked recently about the ethics and legality of Dark Web searches, increasingly part of many investigations. I realized we had never posted on this issue and it’s about time.
Since a lot of what we use from the Dark Web is stolen information, can we make use of it?
In short, the answer
What conveys the truth more effectively?
A snapshot of a person’s values and accomplishments in the form of a quotation? Or a long essay about that person that will contain the short clip but surround it with other facts that could contradict or water down the single line (or build on the quote and infuse
Decent investigators and journalists everywhere ought to have been outraged at news over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal that appears to have caught a corporate investigator masquerading as a Journal reporter.
According to the story, the person trying to get information about investment strategy and caught on tape pretending to be someone he
Clients often ask us whether we tape-record phone calls we make in the course of an investigation. Our brief answer is, “never.” Here is why:
Some states allow tape recording conversations if one of the two people in the conversation is aware that a tape is rolling, but some require that
A wonderful new book called The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman makes riveting reading for anyone in the business of gathering information. Don’t let the fact that the author is an applied mathematician scare you off.
Arbesman keeps his examples mostly in the realms of science and general knowledge, and leaves the law alone.
As investigators, we can’t always get exactly to the evidence we want to prove. Sometimes it merely doesn’t exist. Often, ethical and legal constraints keep us from being able to obtain the facts we definitively need to prove what we are investigating.
It’s easy to get lost searching for the unsearchable, pining for that one nugget that will help everything fall into place. But investigators don’t have that luxury.
So, we sometimes have to do what the computer scientists have done by pinpointing a font as a sign of trouble: We have to take a step back and look for clues elsewhere. We may not have direct evidence of wrongdoing, but we can scour the evidence in order to detect patterns that suggest wrongdoing. Alternatively, we can review the facts to see if we can find any that correlate with what it is we’ve been asked to help prove or disprove.
This is not about making assumptions–we never say that because x exists, therefore y. Instead, it is about being able to look for solutions that advance our clients’ knowledge, even if they fall short of the ideal solution.
Continue Reading Direct and Indirect Evidence: Learning from Computer Scientists
Good investigators are not necessarily smarter than the people they help. What often makes a good investigation is one in which “known” facts are independently evaluated once again. Just as we sometimes want a second opinion on a complex medical or legal matter, gathering and weighing the credibility of facts can also benefit from a fresh pair of eyes.
Continue Reading Good Investigations: A Second Opinion on Most Everything