How to Report Fraud — You're Going to the Wrong Court · A Criminal Attorney on Motions vs. Complaints

Families pay for motions when what they may need is a law-enforcement complaint. Criminal trial attorney Shawn Lee walks through wire fraud, mail fraud, and honest services in plain English — where to send a complaint, what belongs in it, and the $8.75 billion math on the survey complaints. Shawn's framework, presented as education, not legal advice.

Meg hosts. Criminal trial attorney Shawn Lee teaches his framework for organizing records and understanding possible fraud questions — his theory to evaluate, presented as general legal education, not legal advice. The cast of characters is fiction.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

And he said, we gotta tell people about how to report fraud. So give me a little background of what you specialize in and who you are. Okay, welcome to the Santa With Make Show. This is the very first formal show. Last time somebody commented that we looked like we weren't dressed nice, which is funny because we worked all day on this area.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

We were building things.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

We were. We were hot and grass. Anyway. Um, but this is how we we do like to dress very professional. Um, and hopefully, as time goes on, we'll keep match. We like to match, but we haven't got that yet because we like to be together like that. So we might be switching over to Sean's place sometimes or here. We're kind of trying to figure out what's better. We live about a half an hour away. He lives in downtown Kansas City, and I'm about in the suburbs half an hour out. And what'd you call it? Driving out here is like what?

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Uh, it's it's forever. I'm a downtownner, it's forever. It's the suburbs.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

What'd you say? Like it's like Jupiter hurts um, it's like going to Jupiter.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

It is like a different planet, it's a long way.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Anyway, this is episode one from season one. And Sean part if you don't know the history, Sean partnered with me as he saw my all my surveys and what everyone's going through. And he said, we gotta tell people about how to report fraud. So give me a little bit background of what you specialize in and who you are.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

So uh thank you for asking and for for having me uh and for working with me on this. Um, I consider fraud in our virtual courts to be an existential crisis for our country, and we have to discuss it. Okay. Um, my background, I started practicing law in 2014. Uh however, I had an honest profession before that as a soldier.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

You're a soldier. You can go see his pictures, they're on our website.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

So I have a different mentality. Um, I'm not uh part of the good old boys club, I'm not uh somebody's kid from a prestigious law office. Um, and I and I consider our courts to be absolutely essential. They have to function. And in the last six years, I've been practicing criminal law and civil law, and the things that I've started to see, the trends, it it's clear to me that people don't understand that they are victims, in fact, and that they have the power to address that through the courts, through their legislative process, and through law enforcement agencies. Um, specifically, I practice a lot of criminal law. I don't think criminal law is being applied to our family courts or some of our civil courts as it should be. If you file something intentionally false, you artificially inflate your fees, you engage in a conspiracy to artificially inflate fees, you know, you uh count you teach a witness to commit perjury, you forge documents, you obstruct justice. Well, you can ask your lawyer to address that in your case, but you can also file complaint with law enforcement, and those people could be indicted.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

So, what we're doing here is you the next episode, you'll see a fun little thing that Sean did. Sneak peep. There you go. I can't see it. It's the next one. Um, uh we're trying to teach you guys how to recognize this from a professional attorney that does trials. He just had he has a trial tomorrow, don't you? The next two days?

SPEAKER_00 3:31

I have a I had a trial a week and a half ago, and I have a trial tomorrow, and and they're criminal cases. So I am a full-time uh trial lawyer.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

And so Sean is taking his expertise and gonna teach all of us. So we are going to create, try to create, he's busy. Okay, let's just say he's very busy. And we're trying the hardest to get together to record these for you guys. But if you go to standwithmake.com on TikTok, Instagram, and my business Facebook, you can go to subscriptions and watch these full episodes until we can get him monetized and so he can get a little bit of income. We're gonna have to do it like that. Yes. Do we dream of putting it all on YouTube and the whole show? Yes. But as of right now, we got we got to pay him for his time. And so that will go into that. Um, we're also going to create challenges for everybody every week, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

So, yes, every week we're gonna give people a task. And this week, the task is get your invoices, figure out everything you spent, everybody you spent it on every time a judge told you to pay someone.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Ask them. You have that right to ask them now. In my case, my attorney or judge, no, sorry, my in my case, the GAL decided not to do it and didn't want to do it. Um, and so he missed all the months and still didn't produce them. Um, so that's the problem there. Now, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

So let me walk you through lawyer trust accounting basics. Okay, sorry, go ahead. Let me walk you through lawyer trust account basics. Okay. If there is one way, universally in America, to yank a lawyer's meal ticket, pull their bar license, get them sanctioned and thrown out, it is to find out that they are messing with the client trust account.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Okay, that is a hard, hard bye-bye from Does every GL have a client trust account?

SPEAKER_00 5:28

I do believe that is a fact if they are a lawyer.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

So, okay, they're lawyers. So all lawyers have trust accounts?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

All lawyers have client trust accounts.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

I never knew that. So, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

So, what the trust account is, is it's an account that you have to maintain as a lawyer. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

When per client, per client, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

It's the same account, but you have to have individual accounting for each client. Okay. So think of like a pot. The client gives you money for their case. You take their money, you put it in the pot. Now, you did some work on the case, you spent some time, sent some emails, you generate an invoice. There's rules on how you take money out of the pot. So let's say I spend a half an hour with you and I'm billing at $500 an hour, and I generate an invoice. That invoice will say $250. I earned $250. So if you gave me a $1,000 retainer, I have to withdraw $250 consistent with the invoice. If they do anything else, they can be disbarred. Now, where lawyers get in trouble is they don't generate invoices. Or they take all the money out, but they don't explain why they took the money out. Or they take more money out than they needed because they're in financial trouble, or they take the money in advance of earning it, thinking to themselves, I'll put it back when I when I am done.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

And just so you know, the next episode, he is going to go on a rundown. Go on a rundown, run down the invoice. He's gonna show you guys with his pen and teach you what to do with your invoices. So that's on the next episode. So it's episode two. So we will take you step by step. We have a fraud folder, and we will take you step by step on how to teach you how to do this. If you guys go to standwithmake.com and look up, look on the Sean Lee Report, you'll be able to see our website. You'll be able to ask to see have a consult with Sean. You can also ask to have a consult with me. Mine is not legal advice. Mine will just be helping you navigate on how to organize, what to do, find things online. I'm kind of a techie with that, but I do not give any legal advice. That's all Sean. And also, you can write we have about page on there and the documents. Any document we talk about on the show is there for you to download for yourself. So make sure you go there and you can also subscribe to you get newsletters from Sean Lee and me about updated new things. And I honestly would recommend you guys subscribing because there's so much fraud information coming out. Just last week, I remember I called Sean and I said, Sean, did you see this? He's like, just what did you say? I pretty much know everything going on in that area because it's his side, it's his legal side. Now, what's the difference between a criminal attorney versus a family law attorney? It's a big question people don't understand.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Sure. So when you're a lawyer, you've got to you gotta feed yourself. And there's some basic skills that you can take anywhere. If you practice criminal law, you could go to Alaska, you could go to Florida, you could go to Hawaii, you could go to Europe. Doesn't change much. Okay. The statutes might change a little bit, the wording, the formalities, but by and large, asserting a defense in a jury trial is largely the same everywhere you go. And so that's a skill a lot of people come out of law school with is they either go to a prosecutor's office or they go to a public defender's office or a private firm and they learn criminal law. Family law is similar. You can go just about anywhere, throw up a shingle, throw up a sign, say, I'll do family law. And there's gonna be a need, there's gonna be a demand, and you can feed yourself off a lot of that. Now, some people do it but do both. They'll do criminal law, they'll do family law. The key is being competent. You have to be competent. I can theoretically, a person can come out of law school and walk right into a jury trial on a murder case, so long as they are putting the time, the effort, the research in to be competent on what they're trying to do. Right. A person doesn't have to have a history in family law to take a family law case. They have to put the time, the effort, the research in. And so what you have is you have lawyers who spend so much time, so much effort, they only do criminal law because they're really good at it, and that's what they know how to do. Or really good at family law, that's what they do, that's how they know it. But what you also wind up with is lawyers who have tunnel vision. All they know is family law. All they know is those tiny little cast of characters. And those are the lawyers who can find themselves in trouble if they don't realize that some of the trip tricks and relationships they have could be criminal.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

And that's funny you say that. So when I when I was in federal court and I had an attorney, I was talking to the jail attorney and the therapist attorney, they thought I was not stupid. They pretty much thought I was stupid, and they they told me all these lies in the email. And I was like, no, you're wrong. And it's almost like they're so used to being able to do whatever they want that they're not used to anyone standing up and saying you're absolutely incorrect. Um, and so that is where I'm finding a lot of attorneys don't even know the laws or the rules because it's pretty much all opinion-based between two attorneys. Does that make sense? They can decide what they want to do. Oh, you got to do this. Oh, let's mandate you to do this, and people follow. And I think that is the difference. Sometimes people that aren't in like you, you're very, very smart, but you have to be smart in criminal law because you have people's lives that stands, right? You have it's huge. You and he also you have a jury, and jury trial is totally completely different than family court when it's just one judge. And so I think that's that's my perspective of the difference. But I loved hearing his side of the perspective of knowing. I had no idea. I thought they the bar, you had to have a family license. It's just one bar covers all.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

One bar license covers everything except for patent law.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Okay, good to know.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

You gotta apply to be part of the patent law. So I can go, I can do family, I can do probate, I can do criminal, I can do civil.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Wow, the more you know, I had no idea. So when so when someone specializes as an attorney in certain things, they worked hard just let's say they only do criminal law. They know that very well. Now, so they can be a family, they just don't know the law, so they won't touch it. Vice versa.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

You can carve out a niche for yourself.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

It's kind of like how the social worker there, so this the social worker's license therapist, you you can be a social worker or you can literally run a huge million-dollar therapy session for reunification and make millions of dollars with the same license.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

These therapy companies are entirely unregulated. And I I think that they're ripe for investigation. I I think if you look at the Conahan case, the Cash for Kids scandal, these therapy companies and these supervision companies, they're making their money based on orders from judges. Almost nobody is saying, hey, you know what, co-parent? I think I agree to supervision. It's all order, court orders.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

And I once you get in, you can't even only get out. I have to get out. I had a friend that for two years she was in there $200,000 and still was supervised, and nothing was wrong.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Yeah, and they're not regulated, and more importantly, they're not subject to sunshine requests.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

What's a sunshine request?

SPEAKER_00 13:44

So a governmental entity or a quasi-governmental entity, you can send an open records act or sunshine law request. You can say, look, under the law, you're a governmental entity. I want to see your meeting minutes, I want to see your budgets.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

I've done that to one of them here and then never responded.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Because they're private companies. They don't have to respond. And so they could conceivably be paying kickbacks and campaign donations and all these terribly unethical, but not necessarily criminal things. And they're not having to disclose that because they're private companies.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

So one thing I I think when we first started talking, I said, so people need to really start looking for criminal attorneys and not family attorneys anymore.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

So I I've thought about this and I think you're right. Uh but I think it needs to be a team effort. Right now, I I've received just thousands of comments worth of engagement, emails, texts, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

It's it's hard.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

I can't take people's cases on individually, but what I could tell you is that if someone could get their family law attorney on board to partner with a criminal law attorney, to address the fraud from a civil standpoint, and to interface with a criminal law attorney in order to get crimes being committed, then they could address it all around. You can't go into family court and get an undercover agent. Okay, but you can get that out of law enforcement.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Now, if so we have the connection circles on my website. You can go there and check it out. Where families are coming together and talking about the same court actor. Would that be another benefit for them to get multiple people together to file a complaint together? Can they do that with the FBI and stuff?

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Filing complaints together is um one way to go about it, but filing complaints, period, is essential.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

They can't investigate what they don't know about.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Right. So everyone, yeah. Uh for so when I worked on my complaint, I stated a lot of the parents have the same similar things as well on mine. Um, and so you can do that. But yeah, if you don't want to, you still just didn't do it by yourself, but it is good to do it with someone else just because you got someone doing it with you. So you guys are then on the same complaint. And then they will, if they start interviewing and processing it, then you guys will be interviewed uh regarding the same court actor. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 16:15

So yeah, so what you're kind of getting into is remedies in family court. What is your remedy? You can ask for, you know, the judge to deny the requested relief of uh the motion that your co-parent filed. You can ask the court to strike pleadings, okay? You can ask the court for attorney's fees and sanctions, and you can ask for certain uh fees, and that's about it. That's all you can get out of family court. But when you file a complaint with law enforcement, you could open up a whole host of things. You could have a lead investigator be assigned. You could get a joint task force. If this is organized crime affecting courts, you could get a joint task force between the state and fed state and federal agents. You could get confidential informants. Some of these insiders could flip. They could be aware of it, they could be tired of it. You could be cooperating suspects. Maybe they catch one of these court actors committing another crime, they flip them and say, look, you roll over on your co-conspirators, we'll go easy on you. They can send law enforcement agents undercover. They could infiltrate clerk uh courts, they could infiltrate law offices, they could make up fake marriages to see how the case works whenever they they go through the process as fake marriages. They can also do mathematical predictive modeling. They could get access to the court records, see who the really bad actors are, see how long their case much longer their cases take than everybody else, how much more their cases cost than everybody else, how much worse the end uh the outcome is. So when you switch from the family court side to the criminal side, you host, you open up a suite of resources designed to take on perjury, forgery, wire fraud, mail fraud, obstruction.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Yep. All right, so one of the first things Sean taught me was this law. And I wanted him to introduce himself and talk about it and why is this so important for you to memorize? He made me memorize it. Go ahead, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

Sure. So I think that this is going to be the defining issue of our generation. Okay. What is remote work? Remote work is wires. Well, we have a law for wire fraud. And I think the time is ripe for wire fraud charges over what some of the people have done in our virtual courts and our virtual medical system with their wires. So 18 USC 1343 is a law which uh prohibits any scheme or artifice to defraud defraud um by means of false or fraudulent pretenses through the use of a wire.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Uh like when you go in the violations.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Yeah. Uh so what could that be? That could be two people billing for a service that was never rendered, or was so recklessly and negligently rendered as to be fraudulent. Or they did perform the service, but they had a secret agreement amongst one another not to sanction one another for filing false information. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud has historically been used against organized crime syndicates because they like wires. Getting together in person and having a conversation can expose you to surveillance. You get a big organization, one that's in the metro or a state, or even nationwide, or even international, you need wires. So wire fraud is the uh statute for charging people who are engaging in a fraud through wires. Now, here's what's really cool. This uh has a special provision for wire fraud, which occurs in conjunction with a presidential declaration of emergency. Yep, just all that COVID-19. All these virtual courts are the result of a proclamation of emergency by the president, and so all the fraud that is committed secondary to remote workers can get elevated penalties.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

So, real quick, one question. This is COVID, so this is still in play.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

This is still in play. These lawyers, these orders have not expired. Okay, that was my question. Many of these COVID orders are still in place. The judges who enacted the orders really did the judges who enacted these orders really did not have any sort of substantive public debate. In fact, it seems like what they did was they had video conferences and emails where they talked about shutting their courts down in favor of video conferences and emails. So one could even look at some of these judges and say, Did you commit conspiracy to commit wire fraud so that you could commit conspiracy to commit wire fraud?

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Wow, that's okay. So you were saying that this made that law even higher penalty penal higher penalties, penalties?

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah, so ordinarily you can be fined and imprisoned for not more than 20 years or both. But if you committed an act of wire fraud, sorry to get my little bugs on if you commit. Committed an act of wire fraud in relation to a presidential declaration of emergency or it affected a financial institution, such as a lawyer's trust account, or an insurance company, you're eligible for elevated penalties of one million dollars per violation or 30 years in prison or both per violation.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Per violation. So one thing I just talked about last week where my kid, my corporate therapist, got in trouble, and she was fined up to, she could have been fined up to a thousand dollars per violation. Of course, they didn't make her do that. They just said she had taken six extra hours. Anyway, but this is not the courts going after them. This is our agencies that protect us that we are telling them what's going on. So it's a whole different thinking in your brain because everyone's used to looking into you know, going to the federal, going to another judge and asking for the judge to help you, or you know, going to the committees. This is not that. This is where you're just gonna have to open up your mind and really learn from Sean because he has done this for years.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Yeah, yeah. This is different. This is a different route. You've got to be able to put a the evidence together in order to convince a federal agent and a United States attorney to file a criminal charge. And they'll do that. That's what they do. But you've got to put the homework and the time in to explain to them that you have a real case.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

And I want you guys to go. There's another reel that I made about this, what just came into effect that got signed this year. On this reel, you'll see up here, I talk about how Todd Blanche put in effect a making every state have a fraud prosecutor. And actually, the end date was July 6th, you and I figured out once we did all the math.

SPEAKER_02 23:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

So now, like if you go watch that video because it goes more detail, but that is what now those guys are the ones that would be looking at the fraud that Sean is going to teach us on how to file.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

They modified the Department of Justice manual. That's huge. Yeah. You're getting the federal government to change its own prosecution manual to account for all of the wire fraud being committed.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

That's why it was so exciting. And so now it's past July 6th. Start getting your evidence, start watching the shows, and start figuring out what and thinking about how you can file your claims and file your complaint. I have put mine together and then going to the FBI and filing it so you can kind of see how what it's like. Sean will go with me. We're excited for that to come, but we kind of want to teach you first on all of this. Again, welcome to the Stand with Make Show. We are now hosting the Sean Lee Report. You can go to the website, check it out, sign up for email. So if Sean finds something, has something cool, he'll email it out to you guys. If you want to watch this full-on video, it is on standwithmake.com, TikTok, subscriptions only, Instagram, Facebook business, Stand with Make Facebook business. We can't pay Sean and he's taking his valuable time. So as of right now, it's going to stay on the subscription. And we do pray one day we can make an income for him so he can actually then do this all just for on YouTube and you guys can see everything. But until then, we got to pay this guy a little bit of money so that he can take off some time for work. Because tomorrow you got trial.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

I'm going into a trial, but I will tell you that an essential piece of this profession is advocacy and the work that you do. Sometimes you don't get paid for, and it's still essential work. So when I do bill clients, I know that sometimes I'm gonna have to do some work because it's absolutely essential. And this is an existential crisis for the American court system. Yes, it is. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Thank you for joining the Stand with Meg show where we do have the voice for the voiceless. I'm Meg, and this is Sean with the Sean Lee report. And what's your last logo you like to say now? Let's do it. Come on, get some peppiness in your step.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

There you go. There's less criminals in criminal law than in family law.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Thank you. He's getting better, everybody. Do you think he's getting better? I think he's getting better. So all right, signing off.