A US claimant was pursuing recovery from a fraud defendant who had left the United States by the time proceedings caught up with him. The recovery question moved to India: what did he and his family hold here?
“Inquiries ran through the sub-registrar and municipal offices of three cities, office by office.”
The engagement, carried out during my tenure at a global investigations firm, was an asset search built for that posture. The record layer traced directorships, business interests, and property-linked transactions for the subject and his family members, and mapped the family's relationships into a working chart. The field layer went where Indian property records actually live: inquiries through well-placed sources across the sub-registrar and municipal offices of three cities, district by district, registry office by registry office, to surface land and property interests that no database search would return.
Two points from this work apply to most enforcement matters I support. First, once a defendant knows of the claim, assets tend to move to family members and associated entities, so the search has to cover the family. Second, property records in India are held locally, at the registry office, and have to be searched office by office, which remote-only tracing does not do.