## Step 2 - Reading

Reading
You’re going to read an article about social media, rich people and crime.

Look at the picture in the text below.
What do you think had happened before the photo was taken?
He has just robbed a bank? He was playing a game of monopoly? Or the man has filed for bankruptcy?

Now read the text.

#### Instagram snaps From selfies on super-yachts to posing with private jets, the young heirs of the uber-wealthy have attracted worldwide envy by showing off their lavish lifestyles on social media. But these self-styled rich kids of Instagram are, often unwittingly, revealing their parents’ hidden assets and providing evidence for investigators to freeze or seize assets worth tens of millions of pounds, and for criminals to defraud their families. Leading cyber security firms said they were using evidence from social media in up to 75% of their litigation cases, ranging from billionaire divorces to asset disputes between oligarchs, with the online activity of super-rich heirs frequently providing the means to get passed their family’s security. Oisín Fouere, managing director of K2 Intelligence in London, said social media was increasingly their “first port of call”. Daniel Hall, director of global judgment enforcement at Burford Capital, said their targets in such cases tended to be slightly older people who were not really active Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but whose children, employees and associates often were. The firm recently managed to seize a “newly acquired private jet” in a fraud case because one of the two fraudsters had a son who posted a photograph on social media of himself and his father standing in front of the plane. The growing significance of social media in litigation was recently illustrated by rapper 50 Cent, who was ordered by a Connecticut court to explain a photo on Instagram in which he posed with stacks of $100 bills that spelled out “broke”, months after filing for bankruptcy. The rapper claimed the money was fake. Investigators often use location search tools which enable them to throw a virtual “geo-fence” around a certain building or area and gather all of the social media posted from there in real time. Another cyber security company uncovered multimillion-pound hidden assets in a divorce case last year by monitoring the location of the children’s social media posts. The court ordered the husband to give his wife $30m, but he claimed not to have such assets. “We monitored social media, particularly for his young adult kids, and found a lot of posts from the same geo-tagged sites,” said Beckett. “Cross-referencing that with land registry and other similar bodies overseas, we found several properties that were registered in the name of this person. “We went to court with a list of assets that we conservatively estimated at $60m, which the court then seized until he settled the amount that had been ordered.” Beckett said the social media indiscretions of super-rich heirs were also leaving their families vulnerable to fraud and extortion. There has been a huge rise in such cases in the last year, as cybercrime groups increasingly target wealthy families as well as corporations. Jordan Arnold, the head of private client services at the firm, said it was helping the super-rich to devise family social media policies that set out a code of conduct for posting sensitive content, such as images of their properties, yachts and jets. Source: www.theguardian.com By David Batty

Do the exercises.