It is now generally recognised that, when investigating acquisitive crime, investigators must focus not just on obtaining evidence of the commission of the underlying crime itself, but also on what happened to the criminal proceeds. While there has been significant culture change in the UK so that investigators now focus to a greater degree on the proceeds of crime, this is usually from the perspective of tracing what remains of the proceeds so that the confiscation legislation may be applied. Even then such a focus is patchy and inconsistent and much work remains to be done to ensure that the confiscation legislation is applied in a rigorous manner.
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R.E. Bell (2002) studied this question.