Gina Edwards

Gina Edwards is the founder of Watchdog City and a national award-winning investigative reporter who specializes in data analysis, public corruption, securities fraud and corporate crime.

Edwards is the primary architect and inventor of the Watchdog City marketplace platform and its user interface.

During her career, Edwards has uncovered evidence of fraud involving hundreds of millions of dollars related to securities fraud, pump-and-dump market manipulation, mortgage fraud, real estate land trust fraud, hedge funds, mortgage backed securities and Ponzi schemes.

In 2009 while working as a private investigator, Edwards developed securities fraud evidence on behalf of investors that eventually became part of key Securities and Exchange Commission charges involving Charles Schwab's $1.3 billion bond mutual fund that resulted in a $119 million fine and restitution order for investors.

As a reporter, Edwards is recognized for her use of public records and for securing and analyzing large-scale data sets to tease out investigative findings that would be impossible to uncover by hand. Edwards analyzed more than 100,000 real estate sales transactions and warned about the effects of real estate flipping on soaring home costs in an investigation that pre-dated the housing market crash. Another of her investigations exposed weak efforts to enforce Florida’s ethics laws spanning 20 years. Edwards also documented deplorable housing conditions of immigrant farm workers in Immokalee, Florida and shoddy efforts to enforce farm worker protection laws.

In 2006, as a journalist at the Naples Daily News, she organized a team of web developers and journalists to build a searchable online database of more than 100,000 homes sales and median prices by neighborhood, one of the first large-scale searchable online databases of its kind built by a newspaper staff. The database project was part of the Naples Daily News multimedia project "Paradise at What Cost" for which Edwards served as one of the lead reporters.

Through investigative work and beat coverage at the Naples Daily News, Edwards uncovered evidence of bribes and influence peddling by local elected officials and developers in what became known as the Stadium Naples public corruption case. Her reporting ultimately led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and arrests of three county commissioners, the county manager and six developers and financiers, including the original founder of the ESPN cable network.

Edwards' work on that case was recognized with a top national prize from the prestigious journalism organization, Investigative Reporters and Editors. Her work has also been recognized by the Society for Professional Journalists, Scripps Howard Foundation, Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, the Florida Press Club and other organizations.

Edwards has worked as a web development consultant, generating more than $15 million in digital business development leads for clients with her team from 2008 to mid 2012.

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