At 4:12 on a Tuesday afternoon, a regional sales director calls a number registered to a consulting firm nobody at her company has heard of. The call lasts six minutes. The next morning, $18,500 lands in her personal checking account from that same firm. Five weeks later it happens again. Then again.
Neither record says much alone. A phone call is a phone call. A deposit from a consulting firm could be side work. Put them on the same timeline, though, and the sequence starts to look like a schedule: call, then payment, then call, then payment. This post covers how investigators and litigation teams line up call detail records and bank records, what makes a call-then-pay pattern hold up, what makes it coincidence, and how SentVi puts both on one chart.
Two record sets, two different questions
Call detail records answer who talked to whom, and when. Bank records answer who paid whom, and when. Most matters get both eventually, often from different subpoenas, different custodians and different months of discovery. They usually get reviewed separately too: the phone records go to one analyst, the bank production goes to a forensic accountant, and each produces a clean summary of its own half.
The connection lives in the gap between them. A payment that follows a call, on a repeating schedule, between people who otherwise have no reason to deal with each other, is a pattern neither summary will show.
Where the pattern comes up
- Employee departures and trade secrets: a departing employee talking to a competitor’s people while payments arrive from an entity tied to them, before the resignation letter.
- Fraud recovery and asset tracing: a debtor who calls the same associate each time money moves out of a business account.
- White collar and kickback matters: a purchasing manager whose calls with a vendor line up with payments into a side account.
- Insurance fraud: runners who call a clinic or a lawyer’s office, then get paid days later, claim after claim. The insurance fraud ring post covers the network side.
- Criminal investigations and defense: narcotics and fraud cases where calls coordinate cash deposits, and defense cases where the same timeline shows the calls and the money do not line up the way the theory says.
What makes the pattern hold up
- Repetition. One call before one payment is a coincidence. The same sequence five or six times, with roughly the same gap each time, is a pattern.
- Direction. Who called whom matters. If the person who receives the money is the one who placed the call each time, that reads differently from a vendor calling a customer about an invoice.
- Exclusivity. A call to a number the person rarely contacts, followed by money from an entity tied to that number, is stronger than calls to a contact they speak with every day.
- The entity behind the account. Payments from a firm that turns out to share an owner, an address or a phone number with the person on the other end of the call tie the two record sets together. As the transfer post covers, the link is often one or two hops away, not in the payment itself.
- Amounts that track something. Payments that scale with orders, claims or closed deals point to an arrangement, not a gift.
What makes it look stronger than it is
- Dates that are not times. A call detail record is stamped to the second. A monthly bank statement usually shows the date a transaction posted, not the minute it was sent, and posting can lag a day or more. A deposit that “follows” a call may have been initiated before it. Wire confirmations and the bank’s transaction detail often carry the time. The statement usually does not.
- Time zones. Carriers do not always record in local time, and banks do not always use the account holder’s time zone. The three carriers post covers reconciling them before anything gets compared.
- Routine business. Payroll, rent, standing vendor payments and family transfers run on schedules. A call that happens to land before a recurring payment proves nothing.
- Volume. Someone who makes forty calls a day will have a call before almost every payment. The question is whether the calls before payments differ from the rest.
For defense counsel, those are the questions to put to the other side’s timeline. For the team building the case, they are the gaps to close before anyone else finds them. Either way, the full record has to stay on the chart, including the calls with no payment after them and the payments with no call before them.
How SentVi works the comparison
Bring both record sets into one database. SentVi imports Excel spreadsheets, Access and SQL Server tables and queries, and text files. During import the analyst uses Assign Columns to Entities and Relationships to map each column: the phone numbers and calls from the carrier records, the account holders, accounts and transactions from the bank production. Dates come in with every record. The Call Detail Records 101 post covers what the carrier side contains.
Let the overlap merge. By default SentVi matches entities by type and name, so a person or phone number that appears in both productions becomes one entity instead of two. Where two different people share a name, a Unique ID field keeps them apart.
Test the connection. Select the person who received the money and the entity that paid it, then use Get Links Between Selected, or All Paths with Entities Between, to see every route between them: direct calls, shared phone numbers, shared addresses, intermediaries.
Step through the time. SentVi’s timeline filtering and time range controls let the analyst move through the dates and watch the network change. Calls and payments appear in sequence, so the call-then-pay rhythm is visible on the chart, along with every gap that breaks it.
Check who sits in the middle. SentVi’s Social Network Analysis metrics run on the same chart. An intermediary with high betweenness centrality, one that sits on the paths between the calls and the money, is often the person the case turns on.
Export what the team needs. Charts and data export to Excel, PDF and Word for experts, motions and trial exhibits.
The money and the calls tell one story
Bank records show that money moved. Call records show that people talked. Neither shows why. Put them on one timeline and the question changes from what happened to whether it happened in an order that means something, which is a question both sides can see and test.
The video below shows SentVi working a set of call detail records from import to network.
Book a SentVi demo to see the analysis run on records like yours.
