My Unredacted Interview with The Leah Files

Leah Files (0:08)

I'm excited to be here.

Shawn Ryan (0:09)

I'm excited to have you. So you're, I heard you set the internet on fire a couple days ago.

Leah Files (0:16)

Somehow, somehow. Yeah.

Shawn Ryan (0:20)

Well, you're digging into all kinds of stuff, so I'm excited to get it going. But so let me give you an introduction here.

Leah Files, you're an economist, financial analyst and corporate intelligence consultant who has spent more than two decades supporting the US intelligence and national security community. Your career has included work supporting the NGA, DIA, NSA, and CIA with a focus on financial modeling, strategy, and risk. Today, you run a corporate intelligence firm that investigates fraud, deceptive executives, hidden financial relationships, and risks that traditional due diligence often misses. Welcome to the show. What's the name of your firm?

Leah Files (1:06)

Black Widow Global.

Shawn Ryan (1:07)

Black Widow Global? How long have you been doing that?

Leah Files (1:10)

About a year now.

Shawn Ryan (1:12)

A year? Is business good?

Leah Files (1:14)

Yeah. Very grateful.

Shawn Ryan (1:17)

What's the, well, I don't even know if you can say, but what's the most interesting case you've come across so far in business?

Leah Files (1:28)

It's getting more interesting, but I did have a guy from social media reach out, and he wanted me to investigate someone he was going to invest in. That's typically what I do.

And we had a contract, and then I was looking into the guy who was here in Tennessee, actually, very, very shady. The guy, other guy was in England that I'm working for, and he ended up dying two days, three days into my investigation. He was healthy, 40-some-year-old guy. He had just hosted his daughter's sleepover, and yeah, they told me he was, he died. So, very, I think that was the most like jolting one of it all. I think it's something that very has happened to him, but. Wow.

Shawn Ryan (2:13)

You see that a lot?

Leah Files (2:15)

No, thankfully, not in this year, but I probably will. Yeah.

Shawn Ryan (2:20)

Geez. What kind of, I mean, what kind of clients are reaching out to you?

Leah Files (2:25)

So typically, it's private equity. That's how I started, and law firms, you do due diligence, numbers can tell any story that they want, and if you don't trust, you want to look more into it, look at that CEO, I mean, look at Theranos, look at WeWork, so many companies that sell themselves to investors, but then end up breaking down because they're just selling a story. They're not selling what's actually behind the curtain, and that's what I expose. Are they lying? Are they full of it? What do their financials actually tell you? There's a lot of CEOs who will take investor money and just do wrong by it, so private equity and law firms. I do a lot of pro bono for women going through divorces, whose husbands are hiding assets from them, assessing where they would be hiding them, find them for them.

So far, those are my top clients.

Shawn Ryan (3:20)

Where do they hide it the most?

Leah Files (3:22)

It depends on the person.

Shawn Ryan (3:23)

So like a common strategy?

Leah Files (3:26)

It depends on the person.

If you look at who you're married to, what did they start doing prior to the divorce? Do they have businesses? Because if they have LLCs, that's the most common way. Crypto is becoming really big and you can trace crypto.

Shawn Ryan (3:43)

You can trace crypto.

Leah Files (3:44)

Oh yeah. Crypto is actually almost one of the easier ones to trace on the public blockchain.

Shawn Ryan (3:51)

Really? Well, then what's the narrative about like, this is what drug dealers use and all this other stuff?

Leah Files (3:57)

Well, because if you move them between addresses, it's when you cash them out, that's where you get the person. So the means of cashing out that crypto address, but...

Shawn Ryan (4:06)

So you can trace, so no matter how many transactions it's been traced through, you can trace it.

So then what do the criminals do? Do they just buy stuff with crypto? Do they find places where they can just buy stuff with that? Like commodities, and then maybe sell the commodity, like gold or something like that?

Leah Files (4:26)

Yeah, that's a good example. They also, you have to have their crypto address, so they probably have multiple, but once you get one, you can trace it through the blockchain, but you have to get their address.

Shawn Ryan (4:39)

Interesting. Well, I got you a gift.