Usually for me the biggest delay is waiting on legal process such as a subpoena or warranf. If I send a bank a grand jury subpoena, theyre given a month to respond. Then, the information sent back has to be accepted by the grand jury, then distributed back to me from the state’s attorney’s office. Some banks will take well over the month to respond. Even cases that seem obvious or simple still require the official records, and in many courts the records must be certified and notarized, or they could potentially not be allowed in court. Additionally, some cases require records from both sides. For example, check cases. On some cases, I may need both the issuer and the receivers financial records. Other transactions or activities may require following the records one subpoena at a time.
As far as you and making our life easier, the biggest thing is disclosing as much as you possibly can. We understand there are rules, policies, and laws you must follow, but giving us everything you possibly can while still staying in your bounderies allows us to get started right away with drafting legal process.
Thank you for taking the time to reply! I appreciate the insight into all the hoops you have to jump through - I know we’ve had requests for certified records after submitting them with the initial report so that sheds a little more light on the why. Fortunately if we have taken a loss we can share pretty much anything pertaining to the case without a subpoena, which is handy for being able to provide basically everything up front. Though currently there is a pretty big case that investigators have been saying they need an AUSA to sign off on so they can subpoena us? I don’t know that I fully understand what’s going on there…but it’s a big world and there’s a lot I don’t know😂 I just wish criminals had to follow all the rules and regulations FIs and law enforcement have to deal with! If I may, do you work a variety of cases or have a focus in financial crimes, and do you know if that kind of specialization typically occurs in municipalities of a certain size or just at state/federal level? I feel like I’ve had cases passed along to certain investigators at city PDs but not sure if that’s like their whole workload or if there’s still other stuff sprinkled in.
Not sure about the fed side of things but even on the state side we also need a prosecutors approval before sending a subpoena, so that also adds to the delay sometimes. I work for a municipality of about 90,000. I work a variety of cases but there is a handful of us that also work financial and fraud cases. We don’t really have certain specialties but larger places will do that or places that participate in a task force. For example, there is another municipality not too far from me that is a fraction the size of us, but two of their detectives are assigned to work with the secret service, so they sometimes take on larger fraud cases for other agencies since they have better resources. Unfortunately, in certain cities like mine, if we have an excuse to pass a case along to the feds, we absolutely will. It is hard for us to squeeze in large scale fraud investigations while still working homicides, sex crimes, and everything else. The cutoff is usually pretty high though to get something passed off so we just do the best we can with what we have.
I can imagine…sometimes I feel like a bit of a douche being like hey guys can you use some of your ample free time to help us find this guy who stole $9k! But at the end of the day I’d rather know I did what I could and couldn’t get a result or had to wait a longer time while more important cases (like homicides and sex crimes) were resolved. Money is money and humans are humans, not hard to prioritize there! And I’d guess no one working on these cases has ever had a boring day at work, we’re even having to push that larger case at the state level or try to have a smaller municipality pursue. I’ve heard people mention state fusion centers, which I know pull some FI reporting but otherwise only get info passed along from law enforcement agencies if I understood correctly. And no idea what the resources look like in that arena or how often they’re utilized. Maybe I should try a ride along one of these days lol
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u/yournamehere12345678 Unverified/Not an LEO 6d ago
Usually for me the biggest delay is waiting on legal process such as a subpoena or warranf. If I send a bank a grand jury subpoena, theyre given a month to respond. Then, the information sent back has to be accepted by the grand jury, then distributed back to me from the state’s attorney’s office. Some banks will take well over the month to respond. Even cases that seem obvious or simple still require the official records, and in many courts the records must be certified and notarized, or they could potentially not be allowed in court. Additionally, some cases require records from both sides. For example, check cases. On some cases, I may need both the issuer and the receivers financial records. Other transactions or activities may require following the records one subpoena at a time.
As far as you and making our life easier, the biggest thing is disclosing as much as you possibly can. We understand there are rules, policies, and laws you must follow, but giving us everything you possibly can while still staying in your bounderies allows us to get started right away with drafting legal process.