The judgment is entered. 2.4 million dollars, plus interest, plus fees. Then the post-judgment discovery comes back, and the defendant, who ran a profitable regional contracting business for eleven years, owns nothing. The house is titled in his wife’s name. The equipment belongs to an LLC formed fourteen months ago. The operating account that used to clear six figures a month now holds $4,000. He is, on paper, judgment-proof.
Nobody on the recovery team believes it. The question is how to prove it, and how fast, because every month that passes is another month for the assets to move again.
What the file actually contains
A fraudulent transfer matter, whether it’s brought under the UVTA, the UFTA, or Section 548 of the Bankruptcy Code, turns on a small number of facts: what was transferred, to whom, when, for what value, and whether the transferee was an insider. The badges of fraud are well established. Transfers to insiders. Transfers made after the debt was incurred or after suit was threatened. Retained possession or control after the transfer. Transfers of substantially all assets. Absence of reasonably equivalent value.
The problem is never the law. The problem is that those facts are scattered across a file that looks like this:
- Three years of bank statements from four accounts at two institutions, produced as spreadsheets with a few thousand rows each
- Secretary of State filings for six entities across three states, with registered agents, organizers, and members listed inconsistently
- County property records showing deeds, deeds of trust, and a quitclaim
- Vehicle and equipment titles
- The debtor’s sworn interrogatory answers and deposition transcript
- A handful of subpoena returns from the wife’s bank and the new LLC’s bank
Every one of those sources is structured. Every one of them names people, entities, accounts, dates, and amounts. And the facts that win the case are not inside any one of them. They are in the connections between them.
Where the tabs stop working
The traditional approach is for a paralegal or a forensic accountant to build a master spreadsheet. One tab per account. A column for counterparty. A column for date. Conditional formatting for anything over ten thousand dollars. Then a separate tab for entities, with a column for who signed the filing.
It works up to a point, and the point comes early. The debtor’s operating account shows a wire to “Ridgeline Holdings LLC” in March. Ridgeline’s Secretary of State filing lists an organizer who is a paralegal at a formation service. The bank subpoena return for Ridgeline shows the account was opened by the debtor’s brother-in-law. Ridgeline then wires money to a second LLC that bought the equipment at auction. The equipment has now been leased back to the debtor’s former business under a new name.
Five sources. Six entities. Four transfers. In a spreadsheet, that chain is a set of VLOOKUPs somebody has to think to run, and a story somebody has to hold in their head while they run them. Miss one match on a name spelled two different ways and the chain breaks.
In SentVi, the same records are imported as entities and relationships. The debtor, the wife, the brother-in-law, and every LLC are entities. Every wire, every deed, every filing signature, every account ownership is a relationship with a date and an amount attached. The chart draws itself, and the chain from the operating account to the leased-back equipment is a path you can trace with your eye, not a hypothesis you have to test tab by tab.
The three views that matter in a transfer case
The network. Social network analysis ranks entities by how connected they are and by whether they sit between otherwise separate groups. In an asset-stripping pattern, the person who scores highest on betweenness is usually the one moving money between the debtor’s world and the transferees’ world. Sometimes it’s the debtor. Often it’s an accountant, a relative, or a formation agent who shows up on filings for four entities and never once appears in the debtor’s own testimony.
The timeline. The badges of fraud are about sequence. Was the transfer before or after the demand letter? Before or after the lawsuit was filed? SentVi’s temporal view puts every dated event on one axis, and the time-range slider lets you show the chart as it existed the week before suit and the week after. A cluster of transfers in the ten days following service of the complaint is the argument, and it’s an exhibit.
The map. Property and asset records have addresses. When the debtor’s residence, the LLC’s registered office, the equipment yard, and the brother-in-law’s mailing address all fall within the same two blocks, the geospatial view shows it without anyone having to say so.
From the chart to the courtroom
A recovery case is won on paper, in a motion for turnover, a fraudulent transfer complaint, or a charging order. The chart is evidence. Exhibits export from SentVi as network diagrams, timelines, and maps that opposing counsel and the court can read without training. SentVi Reader lets you share the interactive chart with co-counsel, a receiver, or an expert who doesn’t have a license, so the working analysis and the trial exhibit come from the same source.
And because SentVi runs on your own hardware and can be fully disconnected from the internet, the subpoena returns and bank records never leave your control.
The question the recovery team should ask
Not “how many rows are in the file,” but “how many hops between the judgment debtor and the asset.” A spreadsheet answers the first question. Link analysis answers the second, and the second is the case.
Ready to see how the network view changes a recovery matter? Request a demo.
