The president signed an order freezing the assets of more than two dozen people and groups with terrorist links.

Team 4 investigator Paul Van Osdol tracks the money trail. The following is his report:

Any good investigator will tell you the best way to find someone -- follow the money.

WAR ON TERRORISM Complete Coverage

Team 4 talked to some local experts, including one who had a case where he followed the money all the way to Saudi Arabia.

On Monday, Bush announced that the war against terrorism is moving to the financial front.

"We will starve the terrorists of their funding, turn them against each other, rout them out of their hiding places and bring them to justice," Bush said.

Bush signed an executive order freezing the assets of 27 individuals and groups -- most of them tied to Osama Bin Laden.

The Bush administration also put worldwide financial institutions on notice.

"You have two choices -- cooperate in this fight or we will freeze your U.S. assets," Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said.

The feds are also using financial records to track down the terrorists. Team 4 talked to some local experts about following the money, and they said that these records will be critical to finding those responsible for the attacks -- perhaps even more critical than the evidence found at the scene of the attacks.

"Certainly, those financial clues are going to be the key tools in identifying and incriminating those individuals much more so than the evidence you may find at the crime scenes," fraud investigator Jim Fellin said.

Fellin spent two weeks on a fraud case in Saudi Arabia, where he ran into some obstacles that may face those tracking down bin Laden.

"A pretty large corporation, multimillion-dollar corporation, was keeping a lot of its books on these 3 foot by 3 foot hand ledgers that were written in Arabic," Fellin said.

Tracking the terrorists in this country should be much easier. Experts say they had to use credit cards or cash.

"When you look at financial records, you can get a wealth of information about someone's whereabouts, their associates, how they spent their money and who's funding them," former federal prosecutor Stephen Kaufman said.

Once the feds get that information, it should not take long to trace the money to the financial backers of the attacks, whether it's a single group or a foreign government.

The fraud investigators told Team 4 that it is very important that the United States get full access to records from countries with tough banking secrecy laws -- places where terrorist groups and drug dealers tend to keep their money.