As your adversary may hide money in multiple bank accounts, you may need to perform bank searches. For example, my December 21, 2020 post mentioned a scheme in which 150 checks worth $2 million were seemingly hidden at 12 bank accounts. At your bank searches you would seek your adversary’s customer information from banks. Therefore, you would try to collect: account opening documents; signatory cards; monthly account statements; debit/credit card information; & loan instruments. My 3 tips for performing bank searches are:

A) Identify The Bank’s Document Retention Policies

Banks have different document retention polices. Two cite just 2 examples, banks in the U.S. maintain bank account records for 7 years while banks in Switzerland keep their records for 10 years. Although a bank may retain records beyond its retention period, it is important for you to know what this retention period is. You might even decide to forego your bank search if it is based on a stale lead and the bank’s document retention period has long passed.

B) Use The Legal Tools

If you were curious about your neighbor’s bank account balance you could not simply phone your local bank and expect the bank to supply it to you. This is because your neighbor’s bank customer information is not public information. Therefore, you should use the legal tools that may be available to you. The tools can include subpoenaing domestic banks and serving letters rogatory on offshore banks.  You might also be able to use authorization forms for the release of bank account information (i.e. compelled consent forms).

C) Avoid Backdoor Channels

In most cases, it is a crime to collect bank account information by phoning a bank and impersonating a bank customer. This phone call is based on false pretenses and is known as a pretext call.  Another backdoor channel is bribing a bank teller for bank account information. If you hire private investigators or data brokers to illegally access bank account information, then you could be criminally liable. On July 25, 2008 private investigator Victoria J. Tade pleaded guilty to hiring data broker BNT which made illegal pretext calls to banks, the IRS, medical offices; etc. One piece of evidence prosecutors used against Ms. Tade was a transcript of a phone call between Ms. Tade and BNT.  This phone call had been monitored by federal law enforcement agents. As the transcript reveals, Ms. Tade had discussed making pretext calls. Click on the image below to read the full transcript.

Copyright 2021 Fred L. Abrams