In more than 30 years of tracking assets around the world, Ernie Brod has created a global network of former law enforcement officials, prosecutors, intelligence professionals, investigative journalists, and career investigators. Our investigators can effectively reach into nearly every country in the world.

Ernie has successfully traced the assets of:

• Sovereign countries;

• State-owned entities;

• Judgment debtors;

• Recalcitrant spouses;

• Fraudsters and fugitives; and

• Deposed dictators.

Our investigators have decades of experience in combing public records from around the world in multiple languages to identify, gather and review documentary sources of information. We subscribe to databases in the U.S. and abroad that aggregate a wide range of public information from both domestic and overseas sources. Our field investigators are also skilled at obtaining useful information through observation, site visits, and interviews with both our own confidential sources and individuals we identify and locate who are knowledgeable about our subjects.

We employ state of the art technology:

• Our Bank Intelligence software can uncover contacts between targets of investigation and banks anywhere in the world.

• Our Web Intelligence uses artificial intelligence to scour social networks and the sub-surface web, including the “Deep” and “Dark” web and unindexed blogs and message boards.

With our decades of experience in asset searching, we have become sensitive to the “good money after bad” concerns of our clients. Ernie has developed a phased approach to asset searching. In place of a client commitment to a full and widespread search, we conduct a first phase investigation, requiring a more restrained investment, in which we assess the likelihood of success by attempting to develop solid intelligence pointing to the apparent location of recoverable assets.

• Although our first phase investigation will focus heavily on public records, often the best and most reliable information may come from sources on the ground. Our investigators approach confidential sources of their own as well as people whose names have come to us through the public record research.

We are careful to align our work with the client’s strategy. In some cases, the client’s principal goal is to apply pressure to the debtor in order to encourage settlement negotiations. In those engagements, we conduct our investigations more openly and focus on actions that will disrupt the debtor’s business.

Clients who are trying to decide whether to launch expensive litigation, and litigation investment funds, engage Ernie to determine whether the putative defendant has enough assets to make the lawsuit worthwhile.

Who’s Who Legal – Asset Tracing says: “Ernest Brod is a highly regarded asset recovery expert with a wealth of experience working on high-profile cross-border asset tracing cases.”

Representative Engagement

• When the stability of the Greek banking system was threatened by hundreds of billions of dollars in non-performing loans, Greece’s largest banks engaged Ernie to find the assets of the guarantors. In a multi-year assignment, his team penetrated the global reach of Greece’s most prominent families. Ernie’s investigations uncovered: functioning businesses, industrial equipment, farms, bank accounts, houses, yachts, race horses, breeding grounds and stables, and vintage cars.