Royalty fraud hides in volume. Among millions of legitimate submissions and payments, a scheme that misattributes works and routes money to claimants who never held the rights can run for years before the pattern surfaces — and once it does, the company still has to prove what is wrong, how far it reaches, and who is behind it. That was the problem a global media and entertainment company set out to answer.
The situation
A global media and entertainment company that administers a large catalog of licensed works began noticing irregularities in its royalty pipeline. Certain submissions did not align with the company's records of authorship and ownership, payments were flowing to claimants whose connection to the underlying works was difficult to verify, and a handful of recipients accounted for a volume of claims that did not match any legitimate body of work. Internal review could establish that something was wrong but could not establish what, how widely it reached, or who was behind it.
The company faced a problem that was as much evidentiary as it was financial. If it acted on suspicion alone, it risked disrupting legitimate rights-holders and exposing itself to claims of wrongful withholding. If it did nothing, it risked continuing to pay out against works that had been misattributed or fabricated. What leadership needed was a rigorous, independent forensic investigation that could distinguish honest administrative error from deliberate fraud, trace the money to its ultimate beneficiaries, and produce findings that would hold up if the matter moved toward recovery or litigation.
Our approach
Law & Forensics was engaged under privilege through the company's counsel and structured the investigation around the full lifecycle of a suspect royalty — from the moment a work entered the pipeline to the moment payment left it.
Submission and metadata forensics. The team analyzed the registration, submission, and metadata records associated with the questioned works, looking for the digital fingerprints of misattribution — inconsistencies between claimed authorship and the provenance evidence, reused or manipulated identifiers, and patterns of submission that revealed coordination rather than coincidence.
Financial-flow and rights correlation. Law & Forensics correlated the royalty payments against the rights actually claimed, following the money through the pipeline and reconciling each disputed payment to the documentation that purported to justify it. This connected specific suspect submissions to specific outbound payments and isolated the works that could not be supported.
Shell-entity mapping. As the financial trail extended outward, the team mapped the network of intermediary and shell entities used to receive and route the royalties, surfacing the common control and the relationships among ostensibly independent claimants that tied the scheme together.
Quantification and expert preparation. Law & Forensics quantified the company's exposure in defensible, evidence-backed terms and prepared a named testifying expert to explain the forensic methodology, the submission and financial findings, and the entity structure to the trier of fact.
The impact
The investigation established that what had looked like scattered anomalies was in fact a coordinated scheme: a network of related claimants had used misattributed and fraudulent works, routed through layered intermediary entities, to draw royalties they had no right to collect. The forensic findings gave the company a clear and defensible understanding of how the scheme operated and how far its exposure reached, replacing suspicion with documented evidence.
That evidence carried into the recovery effort. Law & Forensics' named expert testimony withstood challenge and gave the company's pursuit of recovery a credible, methodologically sound foundation. With the scheme mapped and the responsible infrastructure exposed, the company was also able to strengthen the controls in its royalty and licensing pipeline to guard against similar abuse going forward.
