When the First Lady of the United States publicly calls for behavioural threat assessment after a school shooting, you’d think family offices might pay attention.
Melania Trump’s recent statement wasn’t just political positioning—it recognised what we’ve known for decades: most attackers leak their intentions beforehand. There are warning signs, but some choose not to see them.
Yet the families with the most to lose remain the most resistant to implementing the very thing that would protect them. Why?
🔹 The Comfortable Lie of Denial
I’ve sat across from dozens of family office heads who admit they’re vulnerable, acknowledge the threats are genuine, then do absolutely nothing about it. The research shows 47% of family offices underestimate their risks, and 41% admit to outright complacency.
That complacency kills people. Not immediately, not dramatically, but it creates the conditions where preventable incidents become inevitable. Families wait until after the data breach, after the threatening messages, after the incident that terrifies their children. Then they act. Then they call us.
People don’t want to believe they’re interesting enough to be targeted. Implementing behavioural threat assessment means accepting you’re visible, vulnerable, and worth someone’s obsessive attention. That’s deeply uncomfortable. It also means admitting your current security—the CCTV, the alarms, the occasional close protection—isn’t actually protecting you from the threats that matter.
🔹 The Mistakes That Make You a Target
The tactical errors wealthy families make aren’t sophisticated. They’re embarrassingly basic.
✅ They post their children’s sports fixtures on social media, creating a schedule of where vulnerable family members will be.
✅ They use the same travel patterns every week.
✅ They discuss business deals in public spaces where anyone can overhear and photograph documents.
⚠️ They fire people badly. A dismissed employee with a grievance becomes a threat with insider knowledge. Yet most families treat termination as a simple HR matter rather than a security event requiring monitoring.
🔒 They trust without verification. Because someone was trustworthy three years ago, they assume ongoing loyalty. People’s circumstances change. Financial pressures mount. Grievances develop. The person you hired isn’t always the person they become.
🔹 What Actually Drives Fixated Individuals
Fixated individuals don’t see themselves as criminals. They see themselves as righteous.
They’ve convinced themselves there’s a relationship—that your public presence means something personal to them. Or they’ve developed a grievance they believe is justified. You represent something they oppose, or a success they think they deserve.
This isn’t opportunistic criminality. It’s a personal mission. That’s why they don’t give up. That’s why traditional deterrents don’t work. That’s why they escalate slowly, testing boundaries, watching patterns, building detailed knowledge over months.
The psychology is clear: they genuinely believe their actions are warranted. In their minds, you’re not a victim—the antagonist in their story. That makes them persistent, patient, and completely immune to security measures designed for criminals looking for easy targets.
🔹 From Reactive Victim to Proactive Protection
Our retained service works because it doesn’t wait for incidents. We continuously monitor your family’s digital exposure across the deep and dark web, concerning communications before they escalate, former employees showing fixation patterns, and activist groups targeting your business interests.
Every 24 hours, we remove your personally identifiable information from locations where threat actors source their intelligence. We train your team to recognise warning signs. We assess concerning individuals using structured professional judgment. We intervene early, before situations cross criminal thresholds.
The families we protect don’t become statistics. Not because threats don’t emerge—they do—but because we identify and manage them while they are still manageable. That’s the difference between hoping you’re not interesting enough to target and knowing someone’s watching for the people watching you.
🚨 Don’t wait for the incident that forces this decision.
Request a confidential threat assessment now, or explain to your family later why you didn’t act when you had the chance.