Private investigators can likewise be employed to execute due diligence for an investor who may be considering investing money with an investment group, fund manager or some other high-risk business or investment venture. This could serve to assist the prospective investor avoid being the victim of a fraud or Ponzi scheme. By hiring a licensed and skilled investigator, they could unearth info that the investment is unsound and or that the investor has shady red flags in his or her background. This is known as investigative due diligence, and is becoming a good deal more prevalent in the twenty-first century with the public reports of large-scale Ponzi schemes and fallacious investment vehicles such as Madoff, Stanford, Petters, Rothstein and the hundreds of others reported by the SEC and other law-enforcement agencies.
(Source: Wikipedia)