Emily Brown

The call is coming from inside the house! Even DMV employees can get involved in vehicle title fraud. Here’s an article out of Illinois where a DMV employee allegedly forged a vehicle title application using government resources.  According to the case, allegedly this employee of the Illinois Secretary of State was trying to get a title for a 2020 Land Rover that was actually a stolen vehicle. This person and a colleague [...]

As a business owner, will you even be able to obtain cyber liability insurance in the coming years? A very troubling quote from the CEO of Zurich Insurance says that cyberattacks will be ‘uninsurable’ meaning there won’t be any amount of insurance you can get to cover this type of event. Most commercial liability policies have exclusions for war and other significant world events, but they may also start to consider cyber [...]

If you’re a private investigator or someone who would hire a private investigator, whether as an individual or an attorney, you need to know about this story. In this article, we’ll discuss three examples of where engagement with an unethical private investigator can cause huge liabilities and can even lead to criminal charges if not done carefully.  Example #1 The first lawsuit was about a personal injury case where a person was [...]

Oftentimes we’re presented with cases where it’s crucial to recover data and records from electronic devices; usually, it’s a client who needs to find out what internet activity is happening in their home. Maybe there are other users in the house accessing certain content. How do you find this information? In many cases, the router itself has retained some of that information.  Here’s a story from the New York Post, where a [...]

If you’re an owner of a classic car or restore classic cars, be on the lookout for unscrupulous restoration companies. Here’s an example of a restoration gone wrong that ended up costing the owner millions of dollars. According to an article from IndyStar, the ex-CEO of Angie’s list, Bill Oesterle, recently won a lawsuit against a former mechanic. In this case, Oesterle was restoring classic cars and decided to work with a [...]

During a fraud investigation, one of the first things we look for is to determine the total pool of potential liability for recovering from that fraud. If you’re a victim of a Ponzi scheme or a crypto scam, whoever the scammer is may have some assets that can be recovered, but what if they don’t have enough to pay off the victims? That’s where the legal theory of third-party liability comes in [...]

If you’re the victim of an online fraud or Ponzi scheme, in addition to recovering funds, one of the most common questions has to do with taxes. Can you deduct losses from an online scam from your taxes? The IRS has a very specific procedure for determining losses from fraud according to CFR title 26 section 1.165-8. If the loss is from criminal fraud or embezzlement, that is subject to personal loss [...]

By now, everyone’s seen the news about the demise of FTX, and the only thing we can say is let’s hope that this puts a monkey wrench in a lot of these crypto scams. And we’re not talking about big crypto companies collapsing, we’re talking about the types of crypto scams where unsuspecting people are targeted by scammers on social media. These are fly-by-night operators, often in other countries that take advantage [...]

If you’re going to hire a private investigator for any kind of investigative work, make sure that you know exactly what they’re doing on your behalf. An unethical private investigator’s actions can result in legal liability for you, whether you knew about it or not.  Toward the end of 2022, according to an article by the Associated Press, the mayor of Reno, Nevada sued a private investigation company after she found a [...]

At the end of 2022, we saw huge developments with large-scale Ponzi schemes, scams, and frauds, FTX allegedly being one of them. With these scams coming to the surface, one significant question being asked is, how can victims of a scam get their money back if the principal took all the money and spent it already? Well, it comes from third-party liability.  According to this article from The Oregonian/OregonLive, investors were approved [...]