Sherwood Last culled its victims from around the world. Those whom I identified were from South Africa, India, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Slovenia, Latvia, Norway, Austria and Poland. They were not the only victims of this fraud, but they were the ones I was able to uncover in my investigation.

The victims were diverse and most of them were left without any money. In some cases I could see their suffering. John, for example, a handicapped retiree in Poland who hoped to earn some extra money to improve his poor living conditions, was left without a cent. Then there was Nick. I was writing a case report in my office one day when the telephone rang. On the line a voice with a South African accent said, "Can I speak to Paolo Bourelly, please?" "Yes, speaking," I said. "Hi, Paolo; my name is Nick Grant. I am a victim of fraud by Sherwood Last, Ltd. I have been left with no money, no job and my bank has closed my account." Mary was a kind Slovenian woman who was trying to shield her boss from pushy cold callers but ended up a victim herself. She told me, "Paolo, I did something I did not imagine I could do. I lied to my husband, I transferred our money to those criminals and I even took out a loan to send them more money. Suddenly, I understood something was wrong but it was too late. I need your help, please."

Then there were the more fortunate, but they were victims nonetheless. Marc, an affable German guy, told me once, "Paolo, this is just one of my hobbies!" Lucky him, he was too rich to care. And Arthur from Denmark just wanted a new toy. He told me, "I wanted to buy my own jet with the return on the investment. When I realized I was scammed, I first went to Sweden to buy the jet anyway and then called you." Despite his wealth, Arthur still wanted his money back.

Four years ago, representatives of Sherwood Last, and of shell companies connected to Sherwood Last, began calling people in Europe, Asia and Africa to solicit investments in the shared capital of large corporations traded on the stock exchanges of New York and Singapore. Among the companies supposedly traded were Sony, Microsoft, Devon Energy Corporation, Rio Tinto and PetroChina Co. None of this was true; the callers were just trolling for money with which they could abscond.

These perpetrators selected their prey through the Internet. They made cold calls to companies and asked to talk to the managing director. In some cases they asked for a specific person, whose name they might have already researched online. During the first call, they did not leave a contact number or send an e-mail with their pitch. They normally called landlines, although in some cases they called the victim directly on a cellular phone, probably because it was available on the Internet. It seemed that many victims were found on the Web site Alibaba.com, where they had placed their company's advertisement.

John Green was receiving many calls a day from different men who told him that a big boss was going to call him back. He thought it was strange that so many different people kept calling to tell him the same story. John was lucky. This uncoordinated behavior triggered his suspicions before he transferred any money to the organization.

Many people who were contacted had, at the time of their first call, received a large amount of money from the sale of a business or a home or had just inherited money after the death of a parent. In other cases, the victim's wealth was well known in his community or had been publicized in the media.

One victim, Karen, recounted her experience for me, and I later found out other investors had similar stories. Karen received a phone call from a British man named Peter who introduced himself as a member of Sherwood Last, with offices in Singapore and Hong Kong. Peter offered to open an investment account with Sherwood Last for Karen to buy and sell stock at a 1 percent commission rate on the purchase or sale price. When Karen decided to start an investment, she received a new account application she had to sign and return. Once the account was open, Peter e-mailed her and suggested certain stocks for her to purchase. She then received a document indicating the shares to be purchased and another piece of paper that provided the banking instruction for the transfer of funds through the Internet.

Once Sherwood Last got the money, a new account representative named John e-mailed Karen a confirmation that her funds had been received. After a few weeks, Peter called Karen again and suggested that she sell her shares at a profit to buy yet another stock. To complete the transaction, Karen had to send more money to cover the difference between the new stock's purchase price and what she made on the sold stock. Again, she received two documents from Sherwood Last: one showing the new situation of her account and the other providing new Internet-transfer instructions. Karen requested, and Peter agreed, to sell a few of her stocks and transfer the money to her bank account. However, shortly after her request, Peter called Karen and told her that her account had been flagged by the U.S. tax authorities and that she had to pay 30 percent in tax on the amount she invested. Karen agreed to let Peter take the taxes out of her account and then transfer her remaining profits, but when she checked her account online the next day, it showed that her entire balance had been used to pay taxes. She tried calling and e-mailing every contact she had at Sherwood Last, but she did not hear from the company again.

In a different situation, which I learned from a victim named James, the investor refused to let Sherwood Last take the taxes out of his account. James told me he was suspicious about the taxes and asked Peter to provide him with the IRS information. James wanted to arrange to pay the taxes himself because he did not trust Peter, since he sprang the taxes on James at the last minute. However, Peter's response shocked James. He received phone calls and e-mails berating him; Peter told him, "You will never see your money until you pay us the tax. Your account has been blocked until the payment is received!"

In other instances, when a victim asked to withdraw his investment, Sherwood Last representatives stopped communication — for a few months. The victim would then be contacted by another Sherwood Last advisor who would tell him the previous account representative had been dismissed for misconduct. "Your account has some problems, but I am here to help solve them." After a while, the new advisor called the victim and proposed a sale and purchase — "to get your account back on track" — which kept the game going. In fact, there were cases in which this pattern was repeated throughout many years. The net of the con game was that when a victim parted with money, it was not seen again. Instead, the scammers would use various ruses to get the victims to fork over even more funds for taxes or additional investments. It was all a lie.

I first became involved with this case when Nick Grant called me and asked me to check the office of Sherwood Last, Ltd., in Hong Kong. I was working as a private investigator and I specialized in financial crimes. Nick told me he had found my Web site online. That was the beginning of an investigation that has taken me across the globe to talk to law enforcement agencies and prosecutors' offices in several countries.

I began my investigation with the information Nick could provide me. He sent me the e-mails, marketing pieces and newsletter he received from Sherwood Last, and I quickly realized the perpetrators possessed good knowledge of financial markets. They were able to analyze available financial information about different stocks and different countries' markets. Based on their analysis, they prepared company newsletters and distributed them to the victims via e-mail. Their analyses and reports on the stock markets were also published on a Web site they created solely for this purpose. This Web site incorporated dynamic information collected from available Internet resources, such as www.marketwatch.com and www.bigcharts.com.

I investigated Sherwood Last to uncover the organization's leadership, when it was formed, where it was incorporated and other pertinent details, and I discovered that Sherwood Last was not the only company involved. My research showed that the people behind this fraud had been using several shell companies that were incorporated in different countries. Four of these were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands:

I found other companies but could not identify where they were incorporated:

When a company is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, the name of the real beneficiary can be hidden. Only the agent who filed the paperwork would know his or her name. To get a court order to disclose the name is very complicated and only in a few occasions has it been done. However, one of the companies associated with Sherwood Last — Truelies International Corp. — was incorporated in Panama, which was a big mistake on the culprits' part. Records of companies incorporated in Panama must show the names of the president, secretary and treasurer. The president is responsible for the actions of anyone carrying a power of attorney, which is the instrument used to hide the name of the real beneficiary.

In communications with the victims, the crooks usually said they were located in Tokyo, so I asked my investigation team in Japan to survey the purported offices of Sherwood Last. Koyoda, my chief investigator in Japan, went to Chiyoda-ku, the area of Tokyo where the office was supposed to be, and reported that the address corresponded to an executive center where many companies were hosted. However, Sherwood Last was not one of them. The day after, I asked Nancy, my best investigator in Asia, to contact the reception desk of the executive center in Tokyo and gather more information. Nancy, with her genial way of dealing with people, was told that Sherwood Last had used the executive center in the past, but moved out a few years ago. I suspected Sherwood Last was not even operating in Japan, but was only using it as a fake address.

In a lucky break for my case, the lawyers of the Hong Kong bank where Asian Health Global and Top International Group — two of the ghost organizations associated with Sherwood Last — held accounts provided Hong Kong prosecutors with substantial information in response to a different ongoing investigation. From the court papers, I saw that Asian Health Global had an office in Hong Kong and Top International Group was located in Singapore. I decided not to interfere with the prosecutor's office, so I did not conduct any further investigation in Hong Kong.

I looked into the many Web sites created by Sherwood Last and its affiliated shell companies. The perpetrators used a privacy-protecting service in the United States to register their sites, which meant the registrar would not disclose the owner of the Web site without a court order. The registrar offered to host clients' Web sites in another country, such as Malaysia or Singapore, and remove or mask the IP of outgoing e-mails. These factors combined to make it essentially impossible to trace e-mails. I was able to look up the Web sites' domain names on www.whois.com, and discovered the year in which one of Sherwood Last's sites was created; that at least gave me some idea of how long the organization had been in operation.

I was amazed at how this scheme was conducted almost entirely online. The Internet was used to create and incorporate their "companies," open bank accounts in offshore countries, create and manage Web sites, find information about potential victims, communicate market knowledge and transfer money around the world. The Sherwood Last fraudsters even called their victims using VoIP telephony and cell phone subscriber identity module (SIM) cards from countries that sold the cards without verifying the buyer's personal information. This meant tracing the calls was next to impossible.

Sherwood Last advisors gave investors a phone number to the executive center in Tokyo where an accomplice would take a message and forward it to Peter or John. Someone from Sherwood Last would then return the call from a VoIP phone number. It was clear to me that none of the victims knew the real identities of the perpetrators. Therefore, I thought, the only way to perhaps catch them was to record their voices. This was quite an experience for most of the victims. The first hurdle was the technology. They asked many questions, such as, "Can I use my cell phone? How do these things work? Which one should I buy? Will they know I'm recording the conversation? What will happen to my money if they find out?"

I provided them with a list of cell phones that were equipped with recording devices and would be suitable for our purposes. There were several on the market, but the recording option was not documented in the user's manual, and the store attendants were often unaware of the feature. A Swedish make had the best recording functionality while a Finnish brand beeped when recording, so an astute person on the other end could tell what was happening. In fact, when victim Jane Idol was trying to record a phone call using the Finnish brand, the Sherwood Last representative abruptly hung up once she started recording. Listening to the conversations was interesting; some perpetrators were incredibly brutal and rude to their victims while telling them they were not going to get their money back.

During the years that the scam lasted, many different people from Sherwood Last called victims to solicit transfers of money, and the representatives seemed to have access to information the victims had shared with other reps in the past, such as e-mails, documents, bank transfers, information on stocks purchased and contracts. This made me suspect that Sherwood Last had client relationship management (CRM) software in place. They demonstrated a strong knowledge of financial markets and innate business savvy. I had spent many years working for large, multinational enterprises, and I could see that this one was run as a professional and well-organized company — albeit fraudulent.

The scammers behind Sherwood Last opened bank accounts in offshore countries in the names of their shell companies and instructed investors to transfer funds to those accounts electronically. They were usually cautious in choosing their offshore banking spots to protect their identities, but there was one exception — Panama. Truelies International Corp. had at least two bank accounts in Panama. With the help of the local authorities, I was able to get the names of the signatories of those bank accounts. My suspicions about the nationality of the perpetrators were confirmed — they were British, Canadian and American.

Overall, I identified more than 25 banks involved in this scheme. A few were used as the correspondent banks to transfer funds to banks in offshore countries. The beneficiary of each of the bank accounts was one of the companies mentioned above.

The combined sum of money transferred by the victims was more than $8 million. Money was transferred to the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Malaysia, China, the United States, Panama, Latvia and the Netherlands Antilles. I analyzed the pattern of the transfers made. First, only three of the shell companies had a bank account in more than one country. Second, through the years, the perpetrators changed their country of banking preference. Third, they did not target British, U.S. or Canadian citizens. Finally, they asked the victims to transfer money into bank accounts located outside their country of residence, which made it more difficult for the local police to investigate.

At the time of writing, I know the identity of only a few perpetrators, either because they were arrested, tried and sentenced for money laundering, or as a result of my investigations. A case such as this one would benefit from the full support of INTERPOL; however, I was the one, working as a private investigator, trying to facilitate the exchange of information among the authorities.

John Yeung, the Singaporean man operating Sherwood Last's Hong Kong shell company, is the only culprit arrested to date. He was charged with money laundering, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison. Unfortunately, he could not be interviewed or questioned during or after the trial by lawyers representing the victims. His victims from Slovenia who initiated the lawsuit did not receive restitution.

Law enforcement and prosecutors in Panama, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, Latvia, South Africa, Norway and the United States are investigating other suspects.

Paolo Bourelly, president of International Security Operations Group Inc. (www.isog.org), is a private investigator who specializes in fraud, money laundering and corporate and criminal investigations. He has worked for organizations including Ericsson; the U.S. Navy; and agencies of the United Nations, local governments, banks and corporations. He has taught financial accounting and conducted homicide investigations for the Italian TV show Second Chance.