The Power of US discovery in a BVI liquidation – part II

In our previous article The Power of US discovery in a BVI liquidation we discussed the use of section 1782 of Title 28 of the United States Code (“1782 Discovery”) as an extremely powerful tool available to Liquidators in the BVI to obtain Court ordered discovery from parties in the United States.  That article focused on the use of 1782 Discovery against intermediary banks.

Use of 1782 Discovery to obtain information relating to email addresses and accounts

When investigating fraud or other dissipation of assets, we often come across email addresses which are used in the fraud (for example to issue invoices or other correspondence) where we can not readily identify the owner of the email address nor any other information relating to that email account.

In many cases, obtaining information relating to the ownership of the email accounts and other information relating to that account could help us determine the parties involved in the fraud/dissipation, identify parties to initiate actions against and to identify and trace assets.

We have recently used 1782 Discovery to seek to obtain disclosure from a major email service provider in the United States to obtain information including but not limited to:

• the names, address, contact information, billing information of the owner/user of the accounts; and
• the IP logs and other information concerning the usage of the email account.

This information has been obtained and has proved extremely useful in our ongoing investigations.