Asset Investigations Part 3 of 3

In this last installment of asset investigations I'll talk very briefly about businesses and/or LLC's, Inc, PLLC etc.

What we have seen in the past with professional debtors is scores of, for the sake of this blog we will say they are LLC's, and bank accounts associated with those LLC's.

In many instances over the past several years we have seen one individual have multiple LLC's which are all owned by other LLC's making the path back to the one individual very time consuming, difficult and costly to you the client.  This may not seem like a big deal to most of you so let me give you an example below;

XYZ, LLC of Arizona would be owned by John Hopper.
ABC, LLC of Delaware would be owned by XYZ, LLC of Arizona.
ABC, LLC would be owned by CBA, LLC of Nevada and so on and so on.  The end result is they are all owned by John Hopper.

All of these LLC's can have their own banking accounts and not just your average checking and savings.  I'm sure by now you can see where this can become a nightmare to put the pieces together.  If their is a single mistake made by an investigator the chain can be broken potentially costing you the recovery of your judgement.  

Once you have a schematic of your debtors LLC's the real work and strategies come into play.  It is vital that your private investigations firm and your attorney have a comprehensive plan in place prior to executing any recovery efforts in these types of complex recovery cases.  To you that means you don't want your team to prematurely submit garnishment paperwork to one particular state which may require a domesticated judgement (thus notifying your debtor you're about to garnish him/her should it be required) taking sometimes weeks to do when you are at the same-time submitting garnishment in the state your judgment was issued allowing for an immediate garnishment.  What this may do is, again, notify your debtor you are about to take his assets allowing him/her the time to fraudulently transfer funds and possibly having to start the investigation over completely.  The timing is critical.

As I stated in Part 2 of this series I do not want to go into too much detail giving an average debtor the ability to became a professional debtor.

As always should you want more information on this topic or would like me to further explain some of our processes at JB National Investigations please let me know!


John Hopper
Director of Investigative Services
john@jbnational.com
www.jbnationalinvestigations.com