Since the end of last year, the SEC has been using a proprietary risk analytics system called Aberrational Performance Inquiry. Basically, the plan has been to spot fund managers and hedgies whose outperformance points to potential fraud - the sort of fraud they missed in the case of Bernie Madoff. Performance that is flagged as inconsistent with a fund's investment strategy or other benchmarks forms a basis for further investigation and scrutiny by the SEC. On Wednesday, this API thingy claimed another scalp: New Jersey-based Yorkville Advisors founder and president Mark Angelo and chief financial officer Edward Schinik were charged with window-dressing their funds. From the SEC statement: "The analytics put Yorkville front and center on our radar screen," said Bruce Karpati, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's Asset Management Unit. When we looked further we found lies to investors and the firm's auditors as well as a scheme to inflate fees by grossly overvaluing fund assets. We will continue to pursue hedge fund managers whose success is based on fiction rather than fact. Which is all well and good - except that rather than running complex risk analytics, if Karpati and his team had just used Google instead they might have hauled these Yorkville executives in for a chat rather sooner. Three years sooner, in fact. The alleged cold truth about Yorkville was just a click away.