Discover how investigative link analysis transforms complex data into visual connections, helping investigators identify relationships and understand criminal networks.

Why Spreadsheets Alone Aren’t Enough for Criminal Investigations

Investigators frequently rely on spreadsheets to organize information such as phone records, financial transactions, addresses, suspects, and criminal associations. While spreadsheets are excellent for storing, sorting, and filtering data, they can make it difficult to understand how individual records are connected.

A criminal investigation may involve hundreds or thousands of records representing people, locations, businesses, phone numbers, and events. Finding meaningful relationships across these records can require extensive manual analysis.

This is where investigative link analysis software provides an important advantage.

Rather than reviewing rows and columns individually, investigators can visualize relationships through interactive network diagrams that reveal how different entities are connected.

How SentVi Helps Investigators Map Criminal Networks

SentVi investigative link analysis software transforms structured data into visual representations that help investigators explore complex relationships.

By connecting people, places, organizations, transactions, and events, investigators can better understand the structure of a potential criminal network.

Link analysis can help investigators:

• Identify Hidden Connections: Discover relationships between suspects, associates, businesses, and other entities.
• Visualize Criminal Networks: Transform complicated datasets into graphical representations of connected individuals and activities.
• Analyze Communication Patterns: Explore relationships within call detail records and other communication data.
• Follow Financial Activity: Examine connections between accounts, transactions, and organizations involved in suspected financial crimes.
• Recognize Important Patterns: Identify shared connections, recurring relationships, and potentially significant entities.
• Communicate Investigative Findings: Present complex information visually to colleagues, supervisors, attorneys, and other stakeholders.

Spreadsheets vs. Link Analysis Software: What’s the Difference?

Spreadsheets organize data into rows and columns, making them useful for reviewing individual records and performing calculations.

Link analysis software focuses on the relationships between those records.

For example, a spreadsheet may contain hundreds of names, telephone numbers, and addresses. Link analysis can help investigators visualize which individuals share telephone numbers, locations, or other connections.

These visual relationships can provide investigative leads that might otherwise be difficult to recognize.

SentVi complements traditional spreadsheets by helping investigators move from reviewing individual records to understanding the larger network.

Video Transcript

# SentVi: Financial Transaction Analysis and Visualization

You could waste valuable time endlessly scrolling through spreadsheets, or you could import your data into **SentVi**.

SentVi is a powerful data analysis and visualization tool that helps investigators uncover hidden connections, follow financial transactions, and understand complex relationships.

Let’s begin with a simple example.

## 1. Visualizing Financial Transactions

What you’re seeing is a group of Venmo accounts and the money transferred between them.

We can expand the network by one degree and ask the database what additional information is available about these Venmo accounts.

SentVi automatically retrieves the individuals known to be associated with specific accounts and adds them to our visualization.

Now we can zoom in and examine these connections more closely.

## 2. Simplifying Complex Financial Networks

The initial visualization provides valuable information, but we can make it even easier to understand.

Suppose we want to hide the Venmo accounts and display only the people associated with them and their financial connections.

Using SentVi’s **Entities → Replace** feature, we can hide the Venmo accounts while retaining the individuals who own them.

SentVi also offers multiple chart layouts, allowing investigators to organize and display information in ways that make complex relationships easier to interpret.

The result is a clear visual representation of how money flows between account owners, without the distraction of account numbers or usernames.

In this example, we can see that **Gideon transferred more than $55,000 to Laya**, and we can follow how that money moved through the network.

## 3. Adding Detailed Information to Entities

SentVi allows investigators to store additional information about individuals and other entities directly within the software.

By double-clicking any entity on the chart, users can access and manage important details, including:

– Significant dates and birthdays
– Geographic coordinates that can be mapped later
– Unique identifiers
– Entity descriptions and summaries
– Supporting documents and attachments
– Social media accounts
– Additional investigative information

In this example, the entity includes a sketch obtained during a previous interview, along with a list of associated social media accounts.

SentVi also supports detailed metadata, such as addresses, height, age, hair color, and eye color.

Investigators can add case notes as new information becomes available, with an **audit trail** that helps document investigative activity.

By selecting the Relationships feature, we can examine the connections associated with Gideon throughout the available data.

## 4. Expanding the Investigation Across Multiple Financial Platforms

So far, we’ve focused primarily on Venmo transactions. However, the database contains considerably more information.

Let’s return to our chart and remove the Entity Replace filter we previously applied.

Suppose we want to examine every connection Gideon has across the entire database.

We select Gideon’s entity and use **Get Links → Entire Network**.

SentVi now reveals the broader financial network, including:

– Individuals and their relationships
– Venmo accounts
– Cash App accounts
– Bank accounts
– Transactions between accounts
– Connections across multiple financial platforms

This expanded visualization allows investigators to see how financial activity connects individuals across different payment systems.

Rather than examining each financial platform independently, SentVi brings the information together into one interconnected network.

## 5. Filtering and Focusing the Investigation

As the network expands, investigators may want to simplify the visualization to focus on the most relevant relationships.

We can reapply the Entity Replace feature to hide Venmo accounts or combine multiple replacement filters to streamline the entire network.

This allows us to concentrate on **who paid whom**, rather than the individual accounts used to complete the transactions.

If Gideon becomes a primary suspect, we can narrow our investigation even further.

Using SentVi’s **Selected and Connected** feature, we can isolate Gideon and his direct connections, removing unrelated information from the chart.

This provides a focused view of the individuals and financial relationships most relevant to the investigation.

## 6. Turning Complex Data Into Actionable Intelligence

This demonstration illustrates a simplified financial transaction investigation, but the same process can be applied to virtually any type of structured data.

Without SentVi, uncovering these relationships could require manually reviewing and comparing multiple spreadsheets.

That traditional approach is time-consuming, difficult to manage, and can result in missed connections or an incomplete understanding of the larger network.

SentVi transforms this process by allowing investigators to visualize relationships, follow transactions, expand networks, and isolate critical information within a single analytical environment.

Instead of searching through thousands of spreadsheet rows, investigators can quickly see how people, accounts, transactions, and other entities are connected.

## Discover the Power of SentVi

Whether you’re investigating financial fraud, money laundering, suspicious transactions, or complex criminal networks, SentVi helps turn disconnected data into meaningful investigative intelligence.

**Follow the money. Uncover hidden relationships. See the bigger picture.**

### Request a Free SentVi Demonstration

Discover how SentVi can help your organization analyze complex datasets, identify important connections, and streamline investigations.

**Contact us today to schedule a software demonstration and request a free trial.**

Email: info@sentvi.com