2025 Forensic Investigations and Financial Fraud
So welcome to 2025. What can we expect in the world of forensic investigations and financial fraud in the year 2025? Well, 2025 is going to have a lot of significant developments in the areas where our agency does business. The most common things that we see are financial fraud, Ponzi schemes, online scams, crypto scams, probate fraud, family law fraud, divorce case fraud, and embezzlement. Those are the areas we see a lot of victims losing money left and right, asset searches, and hidden assets in court cases.

Federal Involvement in Pig Butchering Scams
So what’s going to be the transition for 2025? Well, there’s some good news for victims, and there’s a lot of things happening that we’ll talk about. Number one is the federal government is now getting more involved with these pig butchering scams. Pig butchering scams are when a scammer is online, and they engage with you on social media—Instagram, Facebook, anywhere, TikTok. They will sit there and follow you on your social media for weeks, months sometimes, and pretend they’re a follower or they’re an associate, or maybe they also follow some of your relatives. They think maybe they’re a friend of the family or something.

The Scam Process and How Victims are Manipulated
After several weeks or months, they’ll put a post that has to do with something financial. Usually, they’ll show that, “Hey, I made all this money on this deal. Look at me on the private plane, look at me on vacation, look at me at this fancy meal, look at my new car,” and they try to get you to ask them, “Hey, how’d you make that money?” It’s a trap, right? It’s a scam. They want to pretend that they made a bunch of money and are going to get you to try to give them money. They do it in a way that seems innocent at first—only ask you for a small amount, a couple hundred bucks, an amount you’d be willing to lose. They say, “Look, it only costs a few hundred to start. You put in a few hundred, and they’ll say, look at your account. Your account has $1,000 in it. You made so much profit.”

Escalating Scam Demands and Psychological Manipulation
Then they’ll ask you for more. If your account has $5,000 in it, you can double that in a month. So now you give them another $4,000, and then they’ll show you an account with $10,000 and they’ll say, “You know, if you had $50,000 in your account, you could have $100,000 within 90 days.” They’ll talk and follow your social media, so they know what you’re interested in. You want to buy a house, you want to buy a car, you want to send your kid to college. They’ll use that as talking points to tell you, “Look, if you make this money, you can pay for your kid’s college in cash.” They know how to manipulate you psychologically, and eventually, they take a lot of money from you. Sometimes, they get victims to borrow money to put in.

Government Actions and Victim Protection
What’s happening is the federal government now knows how these things happen. So if you are a victim, you want to do three things immediately. First, file a case with the IC3, which is a government agency that’s tasked with doing this as part of the FBI. You also want to file it with the attorney general in your state, and you want to do that by mail. You don’t want to do that by phone or by email. If you have more questions, you can click the link below for more consultation about specifics. You want to get it filed because the government is going to be taking more action. You may need to provide more evidence, and that’s where if you want to hire a private investigator to do some asset searching or some identification searching on the scammers, you can do that. The website will show you how to do that and what options you have.

Staying Proactive and Involved
The most important thing is you don’t want to be passive. You don’t want to just let it go because in the past, sometimes there’s nothing you could do about it. Money was gone, it’s a loss, it’s a waste of time, it’s futile, right? But now there are more options. The government’s getting involved more, so don’t leave it to chance. Don’t give up. Stand your ground, put your filings in, and look at what evidence you can collect. That’s number one.

Probate Fraud and Family Law Fraud in 2025
What is the second thing that’s going to happen this year? Well, probate fraud is big. We get more contacts now from people whose family members are trying to steal money from their own family. Somebody’s deceased, there’s a will, there’s a trust. Maybe somebody’s not even deceased; they’re just in conservatorship or in a home, and they know, “Hey, nobody’s paying attention. I’m going to quit-claim deed the house to somebody. I’m going to take the car. I’m going to transfer money from their bank account,” right? And they think no one’s going to catch them. A lot of times, they don’t because no one knows to look for it, and no one is suspicious of their own family.

Rising Cases of Probate Fraud and Steps to Prevent It
In the last year, we probably had maybe 15 to 18 hundred conversations with victims of probate fraud, not counting several thousand other inquiries. Thousands of people contact us every year about probate fraud. Of all the conversations we’ve had in our consultations, I can’t remember one where there was no fraud. Every single one we talked to, there’s some fraud. It might be small—sometimes it’s only a few hundred. We had one back in December, earlier this month, where the grandson stole an old car from a barn and forged the title. It’s only a $4,000 car, but it was still a scam.

Changes in Probate Laws and Asset Searches
So probate fraud is huge. What’s going to be different? Well, some states are now passing laws to require an audit of assets. So make sure if you have a probate case or an estate or somebody’s died, you do a full asset search to know what the assets are, to know what they were at the time of death, to know what they were months later, to know what they were a year before, to make sure no one’s monkeying around with where the assets are. Sometimes, they don’t actually change the name on them; they change them from one form to another. They might take it from a bank account and put it in real estate. They might put it from a 401k and put it in stocks.

The Importance of Digital Forensics in Investigations
So, you want to do asset tracing to make sure you understand exactly what’s going on with those assets. The same holds true with divorce cases, although divorce cases are more expected, where somebody’s trying to scam the other person. In a divorce, people are already fighting. They’re already at each other’s throats. There’s no reason not to try to scam the other person. With a probate case, look, these are people that are babysitting your kids. You see them at family reunions, family picnics. You wouldn’t expect that your cousin is stealing money from you. So, don’t have a false sense of security that no one’s stealing.

Protecting the Elderly with Legal Safeguards
If you do have a person in your family who is getting older and they have a will, they have a trust, we recommend that the executor of the estate is not a relative. Make it an attorney or an accountant, and that person is bonded and has regular monthly reporting on what they’re doing with the money. What happens a lot of times is money gets switched around before anybody knows the difference.

Cyber Attacks in 2025 and Prevention Strategies
The other big difference for 2025 is going to be cyber attacks. Cyber attacks are going to start affecting individuals as much as they’re affecting companies. These hackers will get into your computer network, into your router, into your computer, and lock things down—lock up your passwords, lock up your bank account, steal your money. And sometimes, there’s no way you can get around it. What you want to do is good prevention. There are cyber protection policies you can get. One link that we can give you that you can check out is riskcoverage.com. Riskcoverage.com is a place where you can look at options for cyber defense because that’s kind of a big deal now where people are using AI to scam others out of their money or out of their logins.

The Role of Digital Forensics in Legal Cases
Last but not least, our options for digital forensics. Look, if you have a phone or any kind of electronic device—computer, laptop, even an old-school flip phone (I know, weird, right? Here it is—old-school flip phone)—these are devices that are all basically mini-computers. Any kind of small little phone, any kind of larger even desk phones, or mini-computers, they are storing more information than you believe. Even your car has a computer that stores your speed, are the doors open, seat belts buckled, are the brakes applied, are the lights on. All of these devices are containing evidence that you might need in a divorce case, a fraud case, or a suspicion of embezzlement case.

Leveraging Digital Forensics for Evidence Gathering
So what you want to do is, if you have another party that you feel like is not doing you right, that’s harming you, you want to look to see what digital forensics options you have. What can an investigator get from devices? Sometimes remotely. Sometimes routers can be logged into to gather evidence about your case. Just because you don’t have the smoking gun on a piece of paper or a picture, don’t overlook the fact that there are thousands of devices in everybody’s life that’s monitoring and recording activity every single day that might give you the information you need to make a decision or to prevail in some kind of conflict, core case, or litigation. Digital forensics is huge.