There are two kinds of asset search on the market. One produces evidence that stands up. The other produces a spreadsheet of bank balances and account numbers, and the only reliable thing about it is that obtaining it was a federal offence.
Telling them apart is straightforward once you know what is actually available from public and lawful sources, and what is not available at any price without breaking the law.
The bright line: bank balances
Start here, because it is where most people get taken.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act prohibits obtaining, or attempting to obtain, another person’s financial information by making false, fictitious or fraudulent statements to financial institutions. The Federal Trade Commission has enforced this directly. In Operation Detect Pretext it sued information brokers who advertised exactly this service — bank account numbers, balances and investment account details for fees between $100 and $600. In one documented instance an investigator asked for a fiancé’s checking account balance; the broker telephoned the bank impersonating the fiancé, obtained it, and sold it on.
That practice is called pretexting, and it is what a vendor is doing when they quote a fixed price for “all bank accounts and balances”. There is no lawful database of private individuals’ bank balances. Nobody has legitimate access to one. If a report contains that information and no subpoena was issued, someone lied to a bank to get it.
The consequences do not fall only on the vendor. A client who commissioned the search, and any attorney who relies on the product, has a problem — the evidence is tainted, and the commissioning is itself exposure.
What is genuinely findable
The lawful picture is narrower than the marketing but far more useful than people expect, because assets that matter tend to be recorded somewhere by design.
Real property. County recorder and assessor records show ownership, transfers, deeds, mortgages, liens and valuations. In Arizona these are county-level and searchable. Transfers to relatives or to newly formed entities shortly before a claim is filed are visible here, and the recording date is the fact that matters.
Business entities. Corporation commission and secretary of state filings show entities, formation dates, registered agents, officers and status. An individual with no assets who is the sole officer of three active LLCs is telling you where to look next.
Uniform Commercial Code filings. UCC-1 financing statements show secured interests in business assets — equipment, inventory, receivables. They reveal both what is owned and who already has a claim on it.
Court records. Judgments, liens, bankruptcies, divorce filings and civil litigation history. Divorce files in particular often contain financial disclosures made under oath.
Vehicles, vessels and aircraft. Registration and title records, with aircraft registry being fully public.
Professional and regulatory licences. Establish employment, income capacity and, for some professions, financial disclosure obligations.
Tax and mechanics liens, and secured creditor filings. These show obligations, which matters as much as showing assets — a debtor with substantial property and larger secured debt is not a collectable debtor.
Open-source and social material. Photographs of a boat, a listing for a property, a business announcement. Not evidence on its own, but frequently the thread that leads to a record.
What lawful access requires you to accept
Two things, and both are worth stating plainly to a client at the outset.
First, bank and brokerage accounts are reachable only through legal process — a subpoena, a judgment debtor examination, discovery in existing litigation. That is a matter for counsel, not for an investigator’s database. What an investigator can do is establish which institutions are likely to hold accounts, so that process is aimed rather than scattered.
Second, a permissible purpose is required for much of the underlying data. Curiosity is not one. Judgment enforcement, pending or contemplated litigation, fraud investigation and due diligence generally are. A vendor who never asks why you want the search is not applying that test, which tells you how they operate.
How to read a search you have been given
Ask four questions of any report:
- What is the source of each item? A finding with no cited source is unusable in court and probably unusable in negotiation.
- Is it current? Aggregated databases are often years stale. County records are as of the date pulled, and that date should be on the report.
- Is the identification confirmed? Name-only matching is the leading cause of wrong-person findings. Date of birth, address history and known associates are what tie a record to a person.
- Are liabilities shown alongside assets? A report that lists only assets is a sales document, not an analysis.
The realistic expectation
A properly conducted asset search tells you what someone owns of record, what is encumbered, what entities they control, and what has moved recently. It builds a picture solid enough to support a decision about whether to sue, settle, extend credit or enforce.
What it does not do is produce a live balance. Anyone who promises that is describing a crime, and it is worth walking away from the quote rather than negotiating the price.
Honeybadger Solutions runs asset and financial investigations from lawful sources, with each finding sourced and dated so it survives scrutiny. This work sits under private investigations, and where the trail moves into digital records or cryptocurrency it continues through blockchain forensics. Where identity and history need verifying rather than assets located, that is a background check.
This is general information, not legal advice.
Why people commission asset searches, and what that changes
The purpose behind a search determines what is worth doing, and clients frequently do not state it. The four common purposes call for materially different work.
Pre-litigation viability. The question is whether a judgment would be collectible, before spending money to obtain one. A lawyer who learns that a defendant owns unencumbered real property and operates a business with visible revenue makes a different decision from one who learns the opposite. This search is about existence and rough scale, not precise valuation.
Post-judgment collection. Here a judgment already exists, which changes what lawful tools are available. Judgment creditors have access to discovery devices — debtor’s examinations, subpoenas to third parties, garnishment procedures — that no investigator has outside the litigation process. The investigator’s role becomes identifying targets for those tools rather than substituting for them.
Family law and divorce. The question is usually whether assets have been concealed or transferred. The most productive work is document-driven — tax returns, business records, lifestyle analysis against reported income — combined with public filings showing transfers to relatives or newly formed entities around the time a marriage began to fail.
Due diligence before a transaction. The question is whether a counterparty is what they present themselves to be. Liens, judgments, bankruptcies, litigation history and corporate structure matter more than net worth.
Tell your investigator which of these you are doing. A search scoped for the wrong purpose produces a thick report that does not answer the question you had.
Entity structure is where the work actually happens
Individuals of any means rarely hold assets in their own names. Property sits in a limited liability company, the company is owned by a holding company, and the holding company is registered in a state that does not publish member information. The search becomes an exercise in connecting entities to a person through the evidence that does exist.
The connective tissue is usually mundane: a registered agent address that repeats, a shared mailing address across filings, a spouse or adult child named as an organiser, a signature on a recorded deed, a contractor’s licence, a liquor licence, a professional registration, a UCC filing naming a guarantor, a mortgage recorded against a property held by an entity. None of these is a balance. Together they establish control, which is what a court cares about.
This is slow work and it is where an experienced investigator earns the fee. A database subscription produces a list; understanding which thread to pull produces an answer.
Vehicles, vessels and aircraft
Titled and registered property is more findable than most people expect, because registration creates a public record somewhere. Aircraft registration is federal and public. Vessels above certain thresholds are documented federally and searchable. Motor vehicle records exist in every state, though access is restricted and governed by the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act — an investigator with a permissible purpose can obtain them lawfully, and anyone offering them without one is either lying about the source or breaking the law.
The same caution applies to anything advertised as a nationwide asset database returning instant results. The legitimate sources are specific, they are accessed for enumerated purposes, and they leave an audit trail.
Digital and cryptocurrency assets
Cryptocurrency holdings are not findable the way a deed is findable. Public blockchains are transparent about transactions and opaque about ownership; connecting a wallet to a person requires a link established somewhere off-chain — an exchange account subject to identity verification, a subpoena to that exchange, a device examination, or an admission.
What a lawful investigation can do is identify indicators worth pursuing through legal process: exchange account references in email or documents, transaction patterns, hardware wallet purchases, and tax filings that acknowledge digital asset activity. Blockchain analysis then traces the movement of funds once an address is known. Anyone claiming to search for a person’s crypto holdings by name is describing something that does not exist.
Reading the report you receive
A competent asset report distinguishes clearly between three categories, and a report that blurs them is a warning sign. Verified — a recorded document exists and is attached or cited. Indicated — evidence suggests a connection but it has not been confirmed. Unverified lead — worth pursuing, currently unsupported.
It should also state what was searched, in which jurisdictions, over what date range, and what was not searched. A report with no stated scope cannot be relied on, because you cannot tell whether an absence of findings means an absence of assets or an absence of looking.
Cost and timeline, realistically
A basic search across public records in a defined jurisdiction is a matter of days. A search involving multiple states, layered entities, transfers to be traced and documents to be pulled from county recorders is a matter of weeks, and the cost reflects the hours rather than the number of databases queried.
Be sceptical of flat-fee comprehensive searches offered at low cost. They are database pulls, they will find what is easy to find, and they will not find what someone took steps to make difficult. If the asset picture were simple, you would not need an investigator.
This is general information about lawful investigative practice, not legal advice. What is permissible varies by jurisdiction and by the purpose of the inquiry; consult counsel about your specific matter.
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