Public filings, our method

First Brands’ lenders thought the collateral was there too.

It wasn’t. About $2.3 billion couldn’t be located — and the monthly reporting never showed it, because the borrower wrote the reporting.

Below is what the record documents, and what our method reads for on every book, mapped to it mechanic by mechanic. Nothing here is a live read on any current client’s book — it’s a replay against First Brands’ own public bankruptcy filings.

What the record shows

First Brands financed roughly $2.3 billion off-balance-sheet by submitting spreadsheets of invoice data to its factors, who, per the examiner’s report, “did not independently receive or review” the underlying invoices and never verified the receivables with the account debtors themselves.

The court-appointed examiner found “widespread fraud”: fabricated invoices, receivables pledged to more than one lender at once, and funds that couldn’t be traced. First Brands collected its own receivables before remitting them — so it controlled the flow of money the whole way through. Roughly $720 million moved into entities connected to the company’s founder. And around $715 million of one factor’s exposure traced almost entirely to five real debtors: Walmart, AutoZone, NAPA, O’Reilly, and Advance Auto Parts.

Source: court-appointed examiner report (Martin De Luca / Boies Schiller); Chapter 11 filings, S.D. Tex., September 2025; Jefferies 8-K, October 2025; Raistone Chapter 7 filing.

What our method reads for

Every mechanic the examiner found has a matching check — the same read we run on any book, every cycle:

• Spreadsheet-only financing. We tie every schedule back to what actually landed in the bank — not the number the borrower typed.
• Fabricated invoices. When a schedule claims more than the bank ever saw arrive, that gap gets named, in dollars.
• Double-pledged receivables. One dollar can’t secure two claims. The same debtor, the same amount, tied to two different loans — flagged.
• Undisclosed founder transfers. Money moving through an entity no paper knows about gets named and dated, not waved through.
• Self-collection and round-trips. Funds that leave and come home through the same door, with no paper explaining why, get flagged as what they look like.

Every one of those verdicts is flagged, never proven, off bank data alone — Burry doesn’t accuse. Each one ends the same way: get the invoice, get the debtor’s confirmation, get the authorization. That’s the exact verification step the record shows First Brands’ own factors skipped.

What we don’t claim

A fabrication small enough to hide inside the normal noise every honest book already has — a few percent of one obligor’s schedule — won’t show up on bank data alone. That one needs the underlying paper, credit memo by credit memo, and we say so. An examiner that hides its own limits isn’t one worth trusting.