Blog
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Moving From Colorado Springs — Why We Needed a New Location
For many years, our Colorado Springs office was the center of everything we did. It supported early financial investigations, hundreds of client consultations, and the foundational crypto cases that shaped our modern workflow. But by 2022, it became…
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Mapping Wallet Clusters — A Major Leap in Our Methodology
By 2021, scam networks were no longer operating from a handful of isolated wallet addresses. Instead, they were using large clusters of wallets, automated movement patterns, and chain-hopping sequences designed to conceal ownership and disrupt straightforward tracing. To…
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Understanding “Verification Fees” — The Most Common Red Flag
By 2020, one red flag became so consistent across fraudulent trading platforms that it often allowed us to identify a scam within minutes: the demand for a fee before releasing a withdrawal. These so-called verification fees appeared under…
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Case Study: Recovering Funds for a Veteran Targeted by a Fake Trading Platform
In early 2020, a U.S. military veteran reached out to us after losing a significant portion of his savings to a fraudulent trading platform. The company had lured him in with professional-looking dashboards, fabricated profit graphs, and “priority support” that seemed legitimate—until he attempted to…
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The Year Crypto Scams Became Mainstream
By 2019, cryptocurrency scams had officially entered the mainstream. What began as isolated incidents in previous years evolved into highly organized global fraud networks, each with its own playbook, communication structure, and digital infrastructure. The victims were no longer only early crypto adopters—teachers, retirees, small…
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Our First Crypto Case: A $9,400 Bitcoin Withdrawal Scam
Our very first cryptocurrency case arrived in 2018 and involved a $9,400 unauthorized Bitcoin withdrawal from a custodial exchange account. At the time, crypto-related fraud was still unfamiliar territory for many victims—and for most investigators outside of government agencies. But this case quickly proved how…
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Seamus Manley welcomes Kyle Manley — And Expanding into Cryptocurrency Investigations
2018 stands as one of the most defining years in our firm’s evolution.
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Documenting Our First Large-Scale Financial Fraud Case
2017 marked a defining moment for our firm.This was the year we were assigned our first large-scale financial fraud investigation, involving multiple victims spread across three different states. The case exposed the growing sophistication of financial deception in the digital era, well before cryptocurrency became…
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The Rise of Online Investment Scams — What We Saw in 2016
By 2016, online investment scams had evolved far beyond simple email fraud. Fraudsters were now creating sophisticated fake trading websites—interfaces designed to mimic real broker dashboards, complete with animated charts, “profit” readouts, and staged transaction histories. For many victims, these platforms appeared legitimate at first…
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Why We Formalized Our Financial Investigations Practice
When we started in 1999, it served several different parts of our early investigative work. But by 2015, one trend became undeniable: families and individuals were increasingly encountering complex online financial issues that traditional private investigators were not equipped to handle.