ONLINE MASTERCLASSES

We offer a number of different online masterclasses, all of which can currently be registered at on our EventBrite page. While currently these events can only be viewed live through Microsoft Teams, we are planning on producing full sets of these as recordings, and giving access to them here on our website, so keep your eyes peeled. The current suite of masterclasses we offer, both in general, and as tailored private sessions, are as follows:

  • Trust & Foundations

  • Corporate Investigations

If you would like to be notified for when the sessions are live on our eventbrite again, the pre-recordings of them are made available, or if you would like to book private in-house sessions for you and your teams, please get in touch using the form at the bottom of the page.

TRUST & FOUNDATIONS MASTERCLASS

Ever wanted to know more about trusts and foundations - what they are for, how they work, and how to undertake due diligence on them?

This is a 90-minute masterclass session from The Dark Money Files that will give you a decent grounding in all the relevant matters from an anti-financial crime and onboarding point of view. Ideal for those in first-line KYC and second-line AFC and Compliance roles, delivery will be online and include a Q&A session and a resource pack. We will cover:

• What are trusts and foundations for?

• How do they work?

• Who are the people involved?

• What are the KYC, due diligence and monitoring requirements?

• What complications can arise that the regs don’t really cover?

All this will be the same accessible and informative style as The Dark Money Files podcast and live events.

Corporate Investigations Masterclass: (6 sessions)

The masterclass shows how, using Companies House, OpenCorporates and OpenOwnership, the network and relationships between the companies, its directors and beneficial owners can quickly be discovered without any prior knowledge of its existence. 

At the same time it will demonstrate the power and utility of each of these databases and how, when used together, they form a powerful tool for the KYC onboarder, the reviewer or the corporate investigator. 

If you would live to view the free taster session for this masterclass, here it is:

This is the introductory session to our online Corporate Investigations Masterclass, a series of classes looking at the skills, resources and techniques of i...

SESSION 1 

This session looks in-depth at Companies House and specifically Limited Companies. It explains the legal requirements to form a limited company, the different types of limited company and how, understanding this context, can help to identify red flags which are contextual to the company type. 

We look in detail (live online) at three sets of case studies: 

  • A company limited by guarantee (and what makes them different) 

  • A newly formed but legitimate company (and the reasons you can tell) 

  • A series of suspicious companies which appear to be linked and which display conspicuous red flags (note: there is no suggestion that these companies are involved in criminal activity, merely that they warrant further investigation) 

SESSION 2 

Building on session 1 we do the same thing but this time for Limited Liability Partnerships. Although the structure remains the same, the content is very different as LLPs exhibit completely different structures and therefore red flags. 

SESSION 3 

This session then focusses on Limited Partnerships and, in particular Scottish Limited Partnerships which are unique entities and which are endemic to laundromats. 

The unique structure of SLPs is examined in detail and we draw out why this structure makes them so attractive to money launderers and corrupt politicians. Again, we use real life case studies to explain. 

SESSION 4 

Having covered the technical corporate background (with the use of examples) this session now goes into detail around Person with Significant Control (i.e. UBOs) searches, and how to try and verify them using, for example, street view and social media. and other open source information to see how much it can help validate (or invalidate) the supplied corporate information. WE go into detail around the role that UK (and other) entities play in global money laundering schemes and some advanced registry search techniques. 

SESSION 5 

Session 5 covers other forms f internet searching, reverse image look-ups etc. We also look at internet domain names, IP addresses and spoof websites. 

SESSION 6 

We look (but not in huge detail) at the Dark Web, TOR, Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. And the final part of the sessions summarises everything that has been covered previously and draws it together into a cohesive narrative.