Alex Murdaugh was a lawyer at a long-established South Carolina firm. On the morning of June 7, 2021, the firm’s chief financial officer confronted him about $792,000 in missing fees; a hearing was also pending that could have compelled disclosure of his finances, according to the state Supreme Court.¹ His wife and son were killed that night.

In September 2021 the firm said he had misappropriated funds and that it would hire an accounting firm to review its books.³ Federal prosecutors later established a decade of theft: a fake account named “Forge,” opened in 2015 to imitate a legitimate structured-settlement company, through which stolen settlements ran from 2017 to 2021, with Murdaugh its only signer.²

He was convicted of the murders in March 2023.⁴ He then pleaded guilty to the financial crimes in federal and state court.^2,6 In May 2026 the state Supreme Court vacated the murder convictions; the financial convictions were not affected.^1,5

Prosecutors argued that the financial crimes were converging on June 7, 2021, and that the motive for the killings was to buy time. The trial judge first heard eight witnesses outside the jury’s presence, including the firm’s CFO, bank witnesses, co-counsel, former partners and Carson Burney, a forensic accountant in the Attorney General’s office.¹

The judge then admitted all evidence of financial crimes that may likely have led to a motive, describing it as non-propensity evidence that did not suggest a tendency to commit murder, and issued a written order.¹ Murdaugh admitted the financial crimes when he testified.¹

This is the expert’s position in miniature. A forensic accountant can establish what happened to the money with precision. Whether that record is relevant, and how much of it a jury should hear, is a legal judgment the court makes about the evidence, not about the arithmetic.

The ACFE’s 2026 study found a median loss of $104,000 per case, rising above $1.1 million for schemes that ran more than five years, and losses caused by owners and executives more than nine times those caused by employees.⁹ For lawyers specifically, a 2026 New York City Bar report notes that an ABA survey found only 14 states reporting random trust-account audit programs, and that New York’s client protection fund approved 94 awards totalling $11.6 million in stolen client funds in 2024.¹⁰

Kevin Costner and Christine Baumgartner married in 2004 and have three children.¹ She filed for divorce on May 1, 2023, citing irreconcilable differences.³ A prenuptial agreement governed most of the property; it made the family’s Santa Barbara-area home Costner’s premarital property, and the court ordered her to move out by the end of July.⁵

Child support was the contested issue. In June, Baumgartner asked for $248,000 a month.⁴ In July the court set a temporary amount of about $129,755 a month, pending an evidentiary hearing.^2,6 At that hearing, on August 31 and September 1, 2023, both parents testified and each side called a forensic accountant.⁷

Judge Thomas Anderle ruled from the bench: $63,209 a month, the figure Costner had proposed, with Costner also paying health insurance, private school, extracurricular costs and other expenses.⁷

Costner’s income was dominated by one contract. His accountants measured his cash flow over the 30 months to June 30, 2023 and presented two figures: about $1.31 million a month including his Yellowstone earnings, and about $468,000 a month without them.⁷ Baumgartner’s expert put his average monthly cash flow at about $1.54 million.⁶

Costner described the Yellowstone years as an aberration.⁸ In his written statement of reasons, the judge found that Costner’s position preponderated and that applying the guideline formula “would be unjust and inappropriate in this case.”⁸ He called Baumgartner’s expert competent but said her testimony gave him pause, and described Costner’s expert as very capable.⁸

Applying the formula would be unjust and inappropriate in this case.Judge Thomas Anderle, statement of reasons, as reported by Entertainment Tonight⁸

California’s guideline formula is presumed correct, but the presumption can be rebutted where a parent has an extraordinarily high income and the formula amount would exceed the children’s needs.^12,13 The current statutory text took effect in September 2024, after this case; the 2023 ruling applied the earlier version.¹²

First Brands Group was founded in 2013 and grew through more than 15 acquisitions into an auto parts group owning brands such as FRAM, Autolite, Trico and Raybestos, with about $5 billion in annual sales.^4,8

In August 2025, a refinancing of about $6 billion led by Jefferies was paused after prospective lenders asked for more diligence, including a quality-of-earnings review.⁸ Weeks later, on September 28, the company and 98 affiliates filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas.⁸ Federal prosecutors later said it had about $12 million in cash and more than $9 billion in liabilities at that point.¹

In November 2025 the company sued its former chief executive, Patrick James, alleging at least $2.3 billion in liabilities incurred against non-existent or doctored invoices.³ In January 2026, prosecutors in Manhattan charged him and his brother Edward with fraud; both pleaded not guilty.^1,4

Receivables financing turns unpaid customer invoices into cash today. A lender or factor advances money against invoices owed by customers such as large retailers, and is repaid when those customers pay. The model depends on two facts being true: the invoice is real, and nobody else has a claim on it.

The indictment alleges both failed. Prosecutors allege fake and inflated invoices, receivables and inventory pledged two or three times to different financiers, payables financing routed back to insiders, and internal files used to falsify financial statements.¹ Those are charges that have not been tried. Former CFO Stephen Graham, however, has admitted presenting financial statements to lenders that he knew were false.¹¹

One detail from Jefferies’ own disclosure shows the structural weak point. Its affiliated fund, Point Bonita, held about $715 million of First Brands receivables owed by Walmart, AutoZone, NAPA, O’Reilly and Advance Auto Parts, and First Brands itself acted as the servicer directing customer payments to the fund. Collections stopped arriving on September 15, 2025.⁷

What a forensic examiner checks

• Invoice existence. Each sampled invoice is tied to a purchase order, a shipping record and the customer’s own confirmation.⁹
• Lien chain. Fresh UCC searches across every entity show who else has filed against the same collateral.¹⁰
• Cash control. Collections should land in an account the lender controls, swept daily, not one the borrower services.¹⁰
• Related parties. Payments to entities owned by insiders are traced in both directions.^1,8

Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez denied confirmation of the debtors’ plan in August 2026, and the case was converted to a Chapter 7 liquidation on September 1, 2026; a Chapter 7 trustee now controls the estate’s claims.^5,9 Asset sales raised more than $200 million, and at least $222 million of claims from the bankruptcy period remained unpaid when the plan failed.^5,8 The judge said the confirmation ruling did not decide the fraud allegations.⁸

Patrick and Edward James pleaded not guilty in February 2026.⁴ As of October 2026 the trial was expected in February 2027, with each brother seeking a separate trial and blaming the other.¹² Patrick James disputes the examiner’s report.⁸ Until a jury decides, the fraud charges remain allegations.

FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried; Alameda Research was the trading firm he also controlled. In early November 2022, a version of Alameda’s balance sheet was published, customers rushed to withdraw, and on November 11 FTX filed for bankruptcy.⁵

According to the SEC, customers’ dollar deposits were sent to bank accounts controlled by Alameda, some held in the name of a company called North Dimension, while the amounts owed were tracked inside FTX under an internal account labelled “fiat@ftx.com.”⁴ The Second Circuit summarized trial testimony that special privileges in FTX’s code let Alameda draw on a line of credit of up to $65 billion.⁵

Bankman-Fried was indicted in December 2022, tried in October 2023, and convicted on all seven counts on November 2, 2023.^1,2

The core of the analysis was a reconciliation. Take what FTX’s own records said Alameda was holding for customers, then compare it with what Alameda’s bank accounts actually contained.

At sentencing, the judge found losses of about $8 billion to customers, $1.7 billion to investors and $1.3 billion to lenders.¹⁰ Prosecutors had asked for 40 to 50 years; the defense asked for five to six and a half. The court imposed 25 years.^3,10

The “repaid in full” argument

FTX’s bankruptcy estate has since paid creditors in rounds. After the fifth distribution in July 2026, cumulative recoveries for the main customer classes were about 105%.¹² Those percentages are measured against account values on the bankruptcy date, when crypto prices were depressed, and objecting creditors argued that is not a true recovery.¹¹ The courts treated later recoveries as irrelevant to whether a fraud was committed: the Second Circuit held that subsequent appreciation does not undo it.⁵ For litigators, this is a reminder that the date at which loss is measured is itself an expert question.

In 2008, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bought Quimicum, the Luxembourg company that owns Château Miraval in the south of France. They did not hold it in their own names. Pitt’s California company, Mondo Bongo, took 60% and Jolie’s company, Nouvel, took 40%.¹ The Los Angeles Times reported the purchase at $28.4 million.⁴

The couple married at Miraval in 2014, and Jolie filed for divorce in 2016.^1,3 In 2021, after talks about Pitt buying her out, Jolie sold Nouvel itself, and with it Nouvel’s half of Miraval, to Tenute del Mondo, part of the Stoli group controlled by Yuri Shefler.¹ Pitt sued in Los Angeles in February 2022, alleging that the two had agreed neither would sell without the other’s consent. Jolie denies any such agreement, and Nouvel has counter-sued, seeking at least $250 million.^1,4,5

Their divorce was finally settled at the end of 2024. The winery case was not part of it.³

The numbers in the case are a mix of transactions and claims, and they should be read that way.

The $64 million was payable in installments: $25 million at closing and $39 million by the end of 2021, the latter guaranteed by Shefler’s bank. By January 2022, $29 million of the installments was due, and Shefler asked to stretch payments into mid-2022, according to the appeals court.¹

Pitt alleges he contributed nearly $50 million more to Miraval than Jolie did, and that Jolie had accepted a 68/32 split of proceeds as fair.⁴ Nouvel, for its part, alleges spending on Pitt’s projects at the estate and an attempt to move Miraval trademarks.⁵ None of these claims has been decided. Each is exactly the kind of question a forensic accountant is retained to test: which capital came from whom, when, and what it bought.

Charlie Javice founded TAPD, Inc., which did business as Frank, in 2017. Its website helped students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a form millions of families fill in each year.² For a bank, the appeal was the audience: young customers at the start of their financial lives.

In the summer of 2021, JPMorgan Chase made a non-binding offer of $175 million, subject to confirmatory diligence.⁴ The headline figure in Frank’s pitch was 4.25 million students. Prosecutors later established that the real number was about 300,000, and that Javice defined a “user” as anyone whose first name, last name, email address and phone number Frank held.¹

The deal closed on September 14, 2021.⁴ Javice received more than $21 million for her equity and was due a $20 million retention bonus.¹ The misstatement surfaced the following summer, not through an audit, but when the bank tried to use the customer list.

Each step of the process answered a narrower question than the one the buyer cared about. The validator was asked how many records existed and whether their fields were filled in. It was not asked whether the people in those records were real, had used the product, or could be reached.⁴

• The metric was undefined. “User” meant whatever Frank said it meant: a name, an email and a phone number on file.¹
• The test was structural, not substantive. Populated fields prove formatting, not existence.⁴
• The privacy objection narrowed the test. Instead of designing a privacy-safe sample check, the parties accepted a count.⁴
• The real-world test came after closing. It took a marketing campaign in July 2022 to show the gap.⁴

None of this requires hindsight. A forensic examiner reviewing a metric-driven acquisition would ask to trace a random sample of claimed customers to independent evidence (transaction records, login logs, payment data or third-party confirmations) and to reconcile the claimed user base to costs that should scale with it, such as hosting, support and marketing spend.

On September 29, 2025, Javice was sentenced to 85 months in prison and three years of supervised release, ordered to forfeit $22,360,977.48 and to pay restitution of $287,501,078, jointly and severally with Amar.¹ Amar was sentenced to 68 months on November 5, 2025.⁷

Both are appealing; their Second Circuit appeals have been consolidated, and the government’s brief was due in December 2026.¹⁰ In March 2026, the trial judge refused to grant a new trial.⁸ In July 2026, a Delaware Chancery magistrate ruled that JPMorgan must keep advancing the defendants’ legal fees under Frank’s governing documents; JPMorgan has sought review and says the two have billed more than $115 million, a figure that is the bank’s allegation.⁹

The convictions stand but are not final. Any summary of this case should say so.