Cybercrime & Wealth Protection · Founders · Family Offices
If you are a founder or family-office principal, you are not a random target. You are a specific one.
In 2025, the FBI confirmed U.S. cybercrime losses crossed $20 billion for the first time — more than double 2022. As AI accelerates, attacks are faster, more targeted, and harder to detect. This is no longer a technology problem. It is a wealth-preservation problem.
Watch
The cybercrime briefing for high-net-worth individuals
Max Dilendorf, Esq. · NY Digital Asset & Cybercrime Attorney · Since 2017
The trend
We are still early in the cybercrime cycle.
Criminals are using AI to clone voices, map family relationships, bypass authentication, and automate attacks at a scale that was not possible three years ago. For high-net-worth individuals and family offices, this belongs in the same conversation as tax planning, estate strategy, and investment management.
The hard truth
You are the endpoint of failure
You can have the most sophisticated legal structure in the world — offshore trusts, layered entities, privacy-optimized holding companies across multiple jurisdictions. But if your phone is compromised, if your credentials are stolen, if your device itself is the point of entry, the structure becomes irrelevant.
“You are the endpoint of failure. And that is where attackers go first.”
What sets our practice apart is the team behind it. On cybercrime matters, we include retired FBI and Department of Justice enforcement agents — professionals who spent careers building federal cases, coordinating with prosecutors, and deciding which investigations warranted federal resources. That institutional knowledge now works for our clients.
What we are seeing
Seven attack patterns targeting high-net-worth individuals
These are coordinated, cross-border operations aimed at your identity, your access points, and your ability to move money. In our practice, we see them play out in real time.
Pre-attack surveillance
Attackers study you first — for weeks or months — learning your routine and relationships. A compromised phone shows them exactly when you’re unreachable (a flight from New York to Singapore, offline at 35,000 feet). That window is when they act.
Smart-home & physical breaches
Gates, alarms, cameras, and access points run through apps. A hijacked phone or leaked contractor credentials can disable protections and unlock a property remotely. In early 2025, one U.S. coastal-estate breach started with an app and ended at the front gate.
Kidnapping risk & physical targeting
AI makes it far easier to identify HNW individuals, map family relationships, and track real-time location through compromised devices or platforms like Instagram — a documented, accelerating driver of rising demand for kidnap-and-ransom insurance.
Hacked regulated-exchange accounts
Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Binance.US — fully verified accounts still get compromised overnight: 2FA changed, assets moved out in minutes. The response is often “terms of service, go file a police report.” We see the same on Stripe, PayPal, and bank portals.
Website & domain takeovers
With admin access, a professional can redirect your domain, intercept your business email, and impersonate your company — in under ten minutes — shutting down your online presence.
SIM-swap attacks
Criminals convince your carrier to move your number to a device they control. From that moment, every SMS code — every verification text and password reset — goes to them. Often just social engineering of a support agent. We see them constantly.
Data theft & IP extortion
Sometimes used immediately for extortion, sometimes held quietly for months — often against executives, founders, celebrities, and public figures. The data is a weapon, and attackers are patient.
What most victims don’t know
How the legal system actually works
Every platform you rely on — your exchange, bank, carrier, payment processor, companies like Apple, Stripe, and Coinbase — has buried mandatory, binding arbitration clauses in its terms of service. You agreed to them, and almost certainly never read them. So when something goes wrong, your dispute doesn’t go to a public courtroom — it goes into private arbitration, with no press, no public record, and no jury.
When the provider through which you were compromised says there is nothing they can do, that is often the beginning of the legal conversation, not the end. These institutions have contractual obligations around security, authentication, fraud detection, and account monitoring. When they fail to meet them — and that failure contributes to your loss — those failures may be actionable.
The insurance trap
Your cyber coverage may not protect you
Cyber insurance is not a guaranteed safety net. Claims are increasingly denied — often because multi-factor authentication was not fully implemented across all systems as the policy required. The attack happened, the loss is real, but the insurer argues the policy’s conditions weren’t met. The policy exists; the coverage does not.
According to industry data, between 25% and 40% of cyber-insurance claims are now denied. If you carry coverage, the time to confirm it actually protects you is before an incident — not after.
The critical window
The first 24 to 72 hours determine everything
That window decides whether assets can be frozen, evidence preserved, and federal investigators given a real chance to act. After it closes, recovery becomes exponentially harder. Most victims file with the FBI’s IC3 — the right first step — but thousands of complaints arrive daily, and most go nowhere: not because the cases are invalid, but because the reports are poorly structured and lack actionable evidence.
“A well-drafted report gets traction. A generic one will likely be ignored.”
This is where our retired FBI and DOJ agents change the outcome. They know exactly how federal investigators evaluate incoming complaints — because they spent careers making those decisions — and how to present evidence that maximizes the probability of federal resources being assigned to your case.
How we respond
Immediate. Coordinated. Comprehensive.
When time is everything
- Engage federal and state law enforcement
- Structure and file IC3 reports built to move investigators
- Issue evidence-preservation demands before logs are deleted
- Coordinate asset tracing and dark-web monitoring
- Handle controlled ransomware negotiations under FinCEN / OFAC rules
- Represent you in arbitration against the institutions that failed you
Legal architecture and personal discipline
We design ownership and holding structures — in the U.S. and internationally — optimized for discretion, control, and resilience, so it’s materially harder for automated systems and bad actors to map your assets, relationships, and identity.
But the core issue never changes: your phone, your devices, your credentials — that is where everything breaks. The structure matters, and so does every password, authentication method, and device. Both have to be right, at the same time.
The bottom line
Cyber risk is now a core wealth risk
At a minimum, get ahead of it now:
- Audit your digital footprint, including a dark-web scan
- Secure your domain and registrar access
- Stop using SMS-based authentication
- Separate personal and financial communication channels
- Establish a response protocol before anything happens
Cyber incidents don’t announce themselves. They happen fast — and escalate faster.
If you’re dealing with an active incident, call us immediately. If you want to get ahead of this, schedule a confidential consultation. Our team — attorneys, retired FBI agents, and DOJ cybercrime veterans — is ready to move the moment you call.