Establishing what was lost
The sums, the assets and the dates, set out in a form that will survive somebody testing it.
Finance and crypto
Asset tracing.
Money that has been taken is rarely sitting where it landed. It gets moved, converted, split between names that mean nothing and put behind structures built to make the next question harder to ask. What matters is not the fact that it moved. It is what still exists, where it sits, and who can be made to answer for it.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The commonest version is a payment made on instructions that looked entirely correct. An invoice from a supplier you use, a change of account details confirmed by somebody who appeared to be the person you deal with, a completion payment sent on the day it was due. The money left on your own authority and nothing about the process looked wrong until it was too late to stop it.
The next version is value taken from inside. An officer, a partner or a trusted employee moves money out steadily, in amounts small enough to sit below whatever anybody was watching. It surfaces on a change of control, on a death, or when somebody new looks properly at a set of accounts. By then the sums are large and the paper trail is old.
Then there is the counterparty who was never going to pay. The trading company holds nothing. The assets sit in other names, in other companies and frequently in other countries, and they were arranged that way long before your dispute existed. You are not owed money by the business you thought you were dealing with.
The quietest version is a loss nobody has yet described. Money is missing from an estate, a trust, a partnership or a family business, and the people affected can feel the gap without being able to say what it consists of. Nothing can be recovered until somebody establishes what was actually lost.
What actually decides it
The first question is what you lost, stated in a form somebody else could test. Not the commercial sense of having been wronged, but the specific sums, the specific assets, the dates and the documents. Everything after this depends on it, and the work is harder than people expect, because the records that would prove it are frequently held by the person who took the money.
The second is whether anything reachable still exists. Value that has been spent is gone. Value that has been converted into something else may not be. An asset held in a place that will not co operate is a different problem from the same asset held down the road. This has to be answered honestly and early, because the cost of pursuing money is real whether or not any of it comes back.
The third is who can be made to answer, and that is not always the person who took it. It can be a company that received the money, somebody who allowed it to happen, or an institution that owed you a duty. Where the individual has nothing, the claim worth bringing is frequently against somebody else entirely, and working out who that is can be the most valuable part of the exercise.
Then there is sequence and silence. Steps taken in the wrong order announce your intentions to somebody who still controls the assets, and positions that were open close the moment that happens. What can be compelled, from whom, and in what order is a legal question whose answer varies by jurisdiction and by who holds the information. It is the reason the search comes before the claim rather than after it.
What we do
Whether anything is reachable
An honest view of what still exists in a form the law can reach, before money is spent chasing it.
Who can be made to answer
Identifying every party who may be liable, not only the one who took the money.
Protecting the position
Acting so that value is not moved further while the question of what to do about it is still open.
Alongside your advisers
Working with your solicitors, accountants and insurers rather than replacing them, and with regulated partners where the work is reserved.
Saying when it stops
A clear point at which further spending is not justified, told to you plainly rather than late.
When to spend nothing
Where the person who took the money genuinely has nothing and never had anything, there is usually no case worth funding. That answer is unwelcome and it is often the correct one. The mistake people make is spending on the claim before spending on the question of whether there is anything at the end of it, which is the wrong way round and the most expensive order to do it in.
Small sums are rarely worth pursuing across borders, because the cost of reaching value in another country does not scale down with the amount at stake. What is worth doing in every case, including the ones we decline, is closing the hole that allowed it. A payment approval that more than one person has to touch, an account change verified independently of the request that prompted it, and a bookkeeping habit of asking questions cost almost nothing and prevent the version of this that arrives next.
Finance and crypto
More on finance and crypto
- Crypto recovery
- Fraud response
- Structuring digital assets
- Counterparty intelligence
- Recovery and enforcement
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.