For years, I and many other Anti-Money Laundering (AML) investigators and researchers have been plagued with squiggly signatures on Companies House documentation with no names attached.
I recall achieving some breakthroughs thanks to a variety of pioneering
online researchers and bloggers doing some really innovative work or simple
hard graft. These include Graham Stack, David Leask, Richard Smith, Graham Barrow
and a blogger calling themselves ‘Fortified’ – Some of whom I have had the
pleasure of meeting and working with. In fact, this particular article by
Richard Smith titled ‘Trust, the UK PSC Register, and the Squiggle Family’
see https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/trust-uk-psc-register-squiggle-family.html is a perfect
example of the dilemma one can face.
But I now believe it is time that I paid back those favours - and I
sincerely hope that this blog will assist some of us to not only put a
name to a signature but to also then use those details to expand our knowledge
and understanding of the complex global money laundering networks.
I would like to put on record that I am not saying that the names identified
are doing anything criminal. It is ultimately the individuals who seek to abuse
these incorporated companies to commit offences who would fall into that
particular category.
What really got me into signature identification was this fabulous Steemit
blog series by ‘Fortified’ where the focus shone on a signature linked to Sandra
Gina Esparon: https://steemkr.com/money/@fortified/offshore-shell-companies-part-2-or-discovering-the-people-and-companies-involved-in-the-murky-world-of-russian-money-and
Sadly, Part 3 was never published.
Now this signature issue was becoming a real challenge when
dealing with researching Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs). I recall
researching this signature for weeks before getting a breakthrough:
And no, it is not Mr. Squiggle! Please note that I have chosen the
signature link to Damoni LP for simplicity sake, as it gives me a chance to quote
the excellent ‘Smash & Grab – The UK’s Money Laundering Machine’
article published via Bellingcat.com in October 2019. It was not the company I had
previously researched but the signature was the same.
I recall getting the breakthrough on that signature via another excellent
information source at behindmlm.com where I identified a report about a Ponzi
Scheme, which showed the same signature as I had seen on multiple SLPs: https://behindmlm.com/mlm-reviews/buy-time-review-reselling-airtime-400-annual-roi/
which affiliated it with the name Sergiu Valuta. And it was only by
reading this article that I noticed a small but important detail – the reported
company linked to the scheme was a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) – but it
had provided the full name next to the signature of interest. So, I subsequently
researched the LLP named in that article on Companies House and found that the
name of the signatory was only mentioned in full on the Accounts filing documents.
By the way, this was also the case for confirming the Sandra Gina
Esparon signature linked to Always Efficient LLP – yes, the one linked
to the BTC-e crypto exchange that reportedly laundered a large chunk of
the now infamous stolen Mt Gox Bitcoins as well as the recently
published story of the FBI case against the Russian rapper Maksim Boiko
laundering funds via BTC-e back in the day. https://cointelegraph.com/news/fbi-arrests-russian-rapper-for-crypto-money-laundering-cites-damning-instagram
Up until recently, this has been particularly helpful to me and I
have managed to identify a few extra signatures this way. But the journey has
not been simple and there is still a very manual effort to this. I have even
put a customised Google search engine on my website at https://www.intelpool.co.uk/search
which looks directly at the filing history pages within Companies House to
allow for the search of names and to link companies to those names. Pick the
LLPs out of the results and research any submitted Accounts filings and hope to
match the name to the signature. But what if you have the signature and no
name?
Here’s the workaround:
In addition to the above search technique, you should extend your
search to the website of The Gazette (thegazette.co.uk) and only look for PDF
documents.
You can achieve this quite simply using the Google Dork:
site:thegazette.co.uk filetype:pdf + “keyword(s)”
Now the key to unlocking these unnamed signatures lies in the
detail of using one (or a combination) of the following as your keyword:
·
Company Name
·
Limited Partner Name
·
General Partner Name
·
Company Formation Agent Name
·
Address
·
Postcode
·
Signatory name (if known or identified as a
result of this research)
The nice thing about this research is that the PDFs are held within
the Gazette’s own website. This is not currently possible on Companies House as
their filing documents are held within the Amazon AWS servers, which are a
bitch to research using an external search engine dork. You’d effectively have
to scrape all of the PDFs and then OCR them and conduct keyword searches
against that data set.
To round off, I will use Sergiu Valuta as an example.
We know that the signature is on the documentation for Damoni LP
without a signature. What we do know is that this SLP lists Damitra Group Ltd
as its General Partner.
So if we enter the following command into Google:
Site:thegazette.co.uk filetype:pdf “damitra”
The first listed result is: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/company/OC415327/filing-history/MzIzNDA3ODQzMGFkaXF6a2N4
At the top of page 2 of that PDF document, you will find this info…
This particular example is great as it not only names Sergiu Valuta
along with the signature of interest but it also
identifies the name of the signatory Miss Molly Rita Roselie alongside her
signature on behalf of Lamen Business Ltd, which also happens to be the same
for Damoni LP. NICE!
You should note that this does not always work for every search
but once you get a result your intelligence picture will expand rapidly.
To round off, once you have one or more of these components in
place, you can change your keyword searches on both Companies House and The
Gazette and keep expanding. You’ll be amazed at the widespread use of their
names and signatures.
And don’t forget to keep up those adverse media search terms. You’ll
find a lot of stories about how some of these companies have been abused.
Enjoy.
