Litigation Support – White Collar Fraud Investigation – Corporate Fraud Investigation

Contacting Former Employees for Litigation – A Private Investigators View

Former employees are tempting sources of information in litigation for opposing counsel, given that they may be eager to divulge information, can offer some compelling information and occasionally can be disgruntled.

Generally, former employees are fair game in litigation and can prove to be a vital source of information that proves infinitely more compelling than any document. At the very least, a former employee can help connect the dots or corroborate what you already have on paper.

But there is also quite a bit of nuance involved in contacting former employees for litigation, including the legalities, finding former employees, approaching former employees and finding former employees who can be helpful to the case at hand.

So let’s dig in.

Are Former Employees Fair Game in Litigation?

When it comes to the legality of contacting former employees for litigation, the short answer is generally yes, former employees are fair game. Current employees, on the other hand, are generally off-limits.

Simply put, and without getting into the legal subtleties, the courts have made it clear that contacting former employees without notifying the company is acceptable, while current employees generally fall under the category of “no contact,” which prohibits contact with a person who is known to be represented by counsel.

There is quite a bit of nuance here that we won’t fully get into. But, for example, if you know that a former employee is represented by counsel or you are trying to induce a former employee to breach privileged or confidential information, contact is prohibited.

We are no legal experts, and we don’t pretend to be, so be sure to get legal counsel on this topic before taking our advice, as it may differ, depending on the jurisdiction.

Additional Resources

How To Identify Former Employees to Contact

Wouldn’t it be easy if there were a centralized list of employees who worked at a company, along with information regarding their titles, dates of employment, responsibilities and managers?

It would certainly make our job easier, but it just doesn’t exist.

While names of some former employees may come out in discovery, there are a number of methods of identifying former employees of a company. For example, there are dozens of resume databases available on a subscription basis; the professional business social networking site LinkedIn is also a possible resource. While resume databases tend to be better for more blue-collar workers, LinkedIn can be a gold mine if you are looking for people who have worked in positions that have more of a white-collar designation. And if you go the LinkedIn route, I strongly recommend looking into LinkedIn’s premium subscription services; they will save you a lot of time and headaches.

Other methods of finding former employees include reviewing historical captures of the company’s website; reviewing other social media websites (e.g., Facebook) for references to former employment; historical news media research; checking regulatory agencies, professional licenses, litigation filings, and corporate filings; and some deep internet research.

Dig Deeper: How To Find Former Employees — An Investigators Guide

Identifying the names of the former employees is one thing, but finding contact information for them is another. You can utilize consumer-grade investigative databases like TruthFinder, Spokeo and BeenVerified, but we have found these databases to be less than stellar when compared to professional investigative databases. Plus, these consumer-grade investigative databases don’t offer the same advanced-level research capabilities, such as radius searching, age range or employer, as the professional databases do.

We’ve also done some digging into which of the professional investigative databases are the most useful.

What Types of Former Employees Would Be Helpful?

As is often believed by those who watch too much crime drama, there always seems to be that one witness or former employee who spills the beans about everything. While we investigators can dream about the perfect witness who was in the right place at the right time and is ready/willing to talk, that’s rarely the case.

The types of former employees that might be helpful depend, of course, on what type of information you are trying to uncover. As a rule, I generally recommend starting with a range of employees who may have been in a position to have the relevant information you are seeking.

It may be helpful to interview former truckers who could speak about being overworked and undertrained, dispatchers who can talk about understaffing, or trainers who can talk about lack of support from managers.

Former employees can provide insight into the malfeasance, abuse or misconduct by the company’s officers or directors.

Former ride attendants at a theme park can speak to a history of accidents and lack of managers’ concern, but also of managers who may have reported (or disregarded) the concerns.

Former employees can also provide details on collusion between financial institutions, unreported sexual abuse allegations, allegations of corporate malfeasance or

wrongful conduct by superiors.

The truth is that I’ve seen as many janitors and executive assistants provide critical information as I have seen the “perfect” former employee who was in the right place at the right time on the right day provide it. So I recommend a bit of fluidity regarding the types of people you are going to interview, especially at the beginning.

What Is the Best Way to Interview These Former Employees?

I’ve talked quite a bit in other blog posts about telephone interviews versus in-person interviews. There are legitimate arguments for both methods. But in most cases, I would tell a client to conduct telephone interviews first, and if any interviewees are particularly helpful/meaningful, to follow up with an in-person interview to get a signed statement. The exception would be sensitive or high-profile interviews of a short list of witnesses.

Having said that, 100 percent of the time it is preferable to conduct an interview in person. In a perfect world, you would call up the former employee, set up an appointment for a specific place and time, meet the person in a neutral area, and conduct an interview with two investigators — one asking questions, the other taking notes.

But that reality doesn’t really exist in my world.

For one, these employees are under zero obligation to speak, so generally, I don’t want to give the person too much time to think about what they are going to say, so I don’t call them ahead of time to give them a heads-up. I realize that sounds sort of suspicious, but the reality is that if given the choice, most people won’t want to get involved. So, personally, catching a person off guard, so to speak, is better than giving him or her time to think about talking to me.

Also, an in-person interaction can be a logistical and budgetary nightmare when you’re trying to reach employees who are based in different parts of the state or country. Imagine flying across the country and showing up at someone’s home or business unannounced to conduct an interview only to find out that he or she is out of town.   

If there are a few key witnesses who you need to speak to who you are not sure will be cooperative, an unannounced, low-key personal visit might be the best approach.

If there are dozens of former employees based around the state or country, telephone interviews might be best.

Or it may be best to use some sort of hybrid approach, doing some telephone interviews and some in-person interviews.

What Are the Risks of Contacting Former Employees?

Interviewing former employees can be a bit of a crapshoot.

For one, these former employees are under no obligation to speak, so—depending on the sensitivity of the questions, allegiance to their former employee or general reluctance—it’s quite possible that you will get a lot of the proverbial doors slammed in your face.

Frankly, I don’t blame them. Imagine a random person showing up on your doorstep asking you questions about your former employer.

Just recently, I wrapped up an extraordinarily sensitive case where nearly every person I contacted hung up the phone before I could even finish introducing myself. It was frustrating, exhausting and disappointing, but the client was well aware of the challenges and was grateful for and empathetic about our efforts.

Depending on how loyal the person is to their former employer, he or she may go back to their former employer and warn them about somebody snooping around, despite the fact that the contact was perfectly legitimate. I have seen some aggressive attorneys use aggressive tactics to stop any contact.

And there is always the possibility of problems if you reach a current employee.

What Happens If a Current Employee Is Accidentally Contacted?

Despite your best efforts to contact only former employees, there is no centralized determinant of a person’s employment status. As an investigator, we do our best to reach out only to former employees, but on occasion, we will contact someone who is a current employee of a company.

How would one know that they are a current employee?

Because determining a person’s employment status is one of the first questions we ask. “Just to confirm, I understand that you are no longer employed at XYZ Company.”

If we had accidentally reached someone who was a current employee?

We would apologize, thank them for their time and terminate all communications.

How To Approach the Interviews

Under normal circumstances, I subscribe to the idea of interviewing from the outside in. In other words, start with the people who might be on the fringes and work your way closer to the center.

This is much like peeling an onion, first gathering as much information from the surface to get to the core issues and facts, and ultimately working your way to the center of the issue.

Also, from an interviewer’s perspective, knowing the intimate details of the case before you speak to the most relevant players helps build confidence along the way.

There are different reasons why this may not be the best way to approach the case. For tactical reasons, you may want to get to the root of the issue more quickly, but as a rule of thumb, interviewing from the outside in is preferable.

How To Get People to Talk

There is an art and a science to getting people to talk. Sometimes, it’s nothing more than getting the right person on the phone or reaching them at the right moment. But other times, you need to help convince the person to talk.

I can’t force anyone to speak to me, so in building a rapport, I have to strike a balance between persistence, transparency, honesty and pushiness.

There literally are entire courses dedicated to teaching interviewing techniques, but here are a few quick tips:

👉 Build a rapport, but get to the point.

👉 Be accommodating, but don’t give them an “out.”

👉 Have empathy; a stranger asking probing questions can be intimidating.

👉 Be transparent and honest to develop a level of comfort.

👉 Be persistent; leave a message or two or three or stop by their residence and business. But don’t take it too far.

Can You Record Interviews?

Depending on the circumstance, interviews can be recorded, but generally, we don’t record interviews.

There are various state and federal statutes that apply to whether it is legal to record a phone call or conversation. In short, most states are one-party states, in which one person who is a party to the conversation must know about the recording; other states require the consent of all parties.

So for an in-person interview, you can check the local statutes to determine whether you are in a one-party or a two-party state. But the majority of interviews we do are on the telephone, so unless I ask the person which state they are in (which is an awkward question), I don’t know whether they are in a one-party or a two-party state, especially in this period of work from home and work from anywhere.

It’s just not worth the awkwardness or risk of potentially getting a critical interview discarded because of a technicality.

I can, of course, just ask them whether I can record the conversation, but that can put the person on the other side on the edge.

Instead, I take detailed notes of the interview and draft a memo immediately following the interview, which provides a non-verbatim account of the interview. If it’s an in-person interview, we would normally do the interviews with a two-person team, with one taking notes and the other asking the questions.

Final Thought

Former employees can be an incredibly powerful source for opposing counsel in litigation. But there are some nuances in terms of finding the right former employees, approaching these employees and getting the most out of these interviews.

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/by

5 Tips for Investigation Interviews by Telephone

Lately, we’ve done quite a few investigation interviews by telephone relating to personal injury claims, sexual abuse allegations and sourcing inquiries for board members and executive-level hires.

Many people will tell you that face-to-face is the only way to conduct investigation interviews. They say you can’t establish rapport, detect deception, observe body language or control the environment over the phone.

That’s true, but face-to-face interviews can also be impractical, costly or just downright unattainable (global pandemic, anyone?).

I’ve been doing interviews over the telephone for nearly 20 years.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of your interviews.

1Don’t Give Them an Out

After introducing myself and briefly telling the interviewee what I was trying to do in my early days of interviewing, I would always ask, “Is this a good time to talk?”

The response would often be some form of, “Actually, I’m swamped right now. Can we do this later?”

Then “later” would come, and they wouldn’t pick up the phone.

You see what I did here; I gave them an out. I let them get off the phone free of charge.

People are busy. If you give them a way to get out of something, especially a call with a stranger asking them uncomfortable questions, they will probably take it.

I generally just jump right into my line of questioning without giving them an out. If the person being interviewed needs to reschedule, by all means, I am happy to do that. But I am not going to be the one giving them an out.

2“Can You Help?”

Consider these two scenarios:

“I am a private investigator working for a high-powered law firm that has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for its clients, and we are seeking to interview you relating to a tragic accident that occurred under your watch. Do you have a few minutes?”

Or

“Hi Jeff, my name is Brian Willingham, and I was wondering if you could help me out. I’m doing some research for a local firm about a horrible accident that occurred a few years ago. I’ve been reaching out to a number of your colleagues to understand better what happened.”

I’ve exaggerated here, but there are a few keys to the second method.

People. Love. To. Help.

So adding in “wondering if you can help me out” immediately takes people off their guard.

The second key is letting them know that you are also talking to others. If the person on the other end thinks that you are the sole person they are going after, they will probably clam up. 

3 Persistence

We’ve recently worked with a few law firms relating to some sensitive issues. In each case, the law firm was conducting telephone investigative interviews simultaneously. In one of those cases, we had conducted 15 interviews, while the law firm had completed only a few.

Nobody was picking up the phone for the law firm, and nobody was calling back.

What’s the trick, the firm asked?

First, in today’s world, 94.6% of phone calls from an unrecognizable number are probably some sort of spam (I just made up that number; don’t quote me on that). Most people just don’t pick up their phone anymore (you CAN quote me on that).

So there are a few things I try to do. First, I will call a few times in one single day. I’m not sure about the psychology behind it, but people get curious/worried/interested/agitated and pick up the phone after the second or third time.

Also, I don’t leave messages until I have to. And when I do leave messages, I don’t bury the person with details — just something quick and straightforward that might pique their curiosity so they call back.

4Ease Into It

I often receive a line of questioning from law firms about the relevant questions. It makes perfect sense. They know the case inside and out and want to ensure we get the pertinent details.

Usually, the first question on the list often goes straight for the jugular.

Like, “What kinds of policies and procedures were in place to prevent this fatal accident?”

It’s like walking into a bar and asking the first person you see if they want to go home with you.

The thing about telephone investigative interviews is that the person on the other end doesn’t have any responsibility to take the time to talk to you. So you have to ease into it. Get them talking first, build rapport and let them tell you stories about their dead aunt’s cat.

Let. Them. Talk.

THEN, you just might be able to go for the jugular.

5 It’s a Numbers Game

If you had 100 people to call, I think you’d be lucky to get 50 of them on the phone, depending on the type of case. And of that 50, at least a dozen or so would tell you to fly a kite.

Many of them will not have much of anything relevant to say.

All in all, you may get a couple of great interviews out of it.

I’d rather have a bunch of lukewarm leads than a couple of great leads.

Take this scenario:

Option 1: Two possible “leads” who were in the proper position, at the right time, in the right place.

Option 2: Fifteen potential leads who were in the right place, at the right time, but were not in the perfect position.

If you gave me these two options for telephone investigative interviews, I would take Option 2 every time.

Why? Because it’s a numbers game. People aren’t going to pick up their phone, won’t cooperate, will be hesitant to provide details or will simply not be very helpful.

And the reality is that you just don’t know who will be helpful.

I’ve had cases where the most unlikely people have been the most helpful.

In Closing…

Telephone investigative interviewing takes a lot of patience, persistence, listening, empathy and some thick skin, but hopefully, these tips can help make you a better interviewer.  

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/by

Four Screen Capture Tools for Private Investigators

Screen capture tools for saving social media pages and web pages is a topic that comes up frequently for private investigators. There are tons of tools out there, ranging from the simple snipping tools to complex screen capture software that “captures” metadata, timestamps and links.

There are some companies that offer really expensive tools for collecting evidence on a mass enterprise scale, like PageFreezer, X1 Social Discovery and the like. These services can cost thousands of dollars and are designed for big-data collection.

While those are amazing tools for massive cases, that’s not what most of us small investigation shops do.

More often than not, my typical use case would be when I need to:

  1. Screen capture something to add into a report;
  2. Save an entire web page to include as an attachment to a report or collecting “evidence” (I am using that term pretty loosely here); or
  3. Capture some critical piece of information that may disappear from the Interwebs (that’s a technical term).

While most of the work that I do as a private investigator does not end up in court, I constantly have an eye toward how the information is collected in case it ever does end up in court.

So, for example, if I am conducting a sensitive interview, I might want to record the interview (with permission depending on the state you are in), have a second witness with me to validate the conversation or draft a summary of the interview immediately after, and have the person sign an affidavit or declaration. That way, in case the person misremembers something or changes his or her mind, I’ve got some good backup.

Similarly, if I ever need to authenticate any of our background investigation research, I can refer to the court document, news article or corporate filings where we found the information. If needed, I can get certified copies of court documents of government filings to present in court.

More frequently, information for the vast majority of our casework is being collected via the Internet, especially social media. Since that type of information can be deleted or altered at any moment, simply including a link to a web page in our report may not be enough, since by the time it comes up, it may not be there anymore.

The more sensitive the case, the more cautious you need to be.

Warning

Before I get into the meat of this post, I am not a legal expert and don’t pretend to be. If you are doing some serious evidence collection with a lot at stake, you should first consult an expert and/or an attorney.

Don’t rely on what I tell you.

That being said, after years of collecting information, this is the process that I typically go through.

Screen Capture for Quick, Everyday Use

Built-in screenshot applications on Mac and the snipping tool on Windows computers are good if you need to capture something quickly to share. They can easily be stored on your computer and dropped into an email or report, and offer a great visual.

I also use the built-in features of Google Chrome’s “Save as a PDF” to capture an entire web page. These are typically pieces of information that are particularly interesting that I may want to refer to. What I like about this form of data collection over simply just taking a screenshot is that the text is searchable, so I can recall the information by simply searching my computer without much of a problem.

In terms of preserving evidence, neither of these ways is particularly good. Screenshots are just photos and can be easily altered; the same goes for PDFs. It doesn’t take much to alter those, either. 

I’ve got some pretty rudimentary Photoshop skills from 20+ years ago, but I am pretty sure I can alter a screenshot to make it look legit enough that nobody would be able to tell it is a fake.

Not that I would ever do that.

So, even if the initial manner in which you preserve the evidence isn’t the best, it might be important to capture something quickly, because it might be taken down.

Screen Capture for Good-Looking Screenshots, with Extra Protection

As described above, most web browsers give you the option to save as a PDF, which includes the URL and date/time of capture; most of these built-in features give you a jumbled-looking, ugly PDF.

There are several Firefox and Chrome add-ons that make the page look a lot prettier. Fireshot and GoFullPage are two of the most popular (although as of the date of this post, Fireshot for Chrome is not working). I strongly recommend the paid versions of these; they have features like adding a date and full URL.

There are a number of built-in features to make screenshots pretty by using “smart” PDF page splitting, and include the URL and timestamp on the page.

While this is similar to saving a page to a PDF, it makes it look so much better. It will look exactly like the web page as you see it, so it’s familiar to everyone. What you see is what you get; WYSIWYG for you nerds out there.

(Note: GoFullPage looks like they have a “legal” version in the works for legal professionals that seems interesting.)

So, if you need a pain-free way of collecting a web page exactly as you see it, to attach to a report or court filing, this may be a good choice.

Secure Collection

For cases that I think may end up in court or involve scenarios in which authenticity may be challenged, I turn to Hunchly.

This is where things start getting nerdy. But in short, if you need to collect evidence that may be ultimately challenged and attacked in court or elsewhere, you need to start thinking about collecting evidence to be preserved accurately and minimizing the risk of tampering.

For this, I use Hunchly, a lightweight Chrome extension that captures web pages in MHTML format, and that includes a timestamp and maintains links and metadata. What Hunchly captures is automatically timestamped, hashed and stored on your computer hard drive. So, while you are scrolling around the Internet, Hunchly is working in the background saving everything that you are doing in a secure way.

What’s great about this is that you can always go back and search Hunchly for something that you captured, meaning you don’t have to worry about recalling the exact web page of some little nugget of information that you found weeks ago.

All of the data is stored on your computer, where it can be saved for eternity.

I don’t use this in every case I work, but there are cases in which I will. In other cases, I might save a few web pages into Hunchly if they are important. This way, I’ve always got a record of them, in case it ever comes up again. 

Hunchly is not perfect. It doesn’t do a great job with scrolling web pages, like a Facebook or Twitter timeline. It also doesn’t always produce the prettiest looking pages that, for example, I can attach to a court filing.

So what do I typically do?

For sensitive cases, I will capture them through Hunchly; then, to preserve them and capture them, I will use GoFullPage to include in a report or affidavit. This way, I have the secured collection of Hunchly, with the lovely PDF that GoFullPage will produce.

(I spoke to Justin Seitz, founder of Hunchly, and he says that Version 3.0 of Hunchly is going to handle some things much better.)

Hunchly costs $130 per year and it is worth every penny for the peace of mind it affords.

For Secure, Court-Ready Critical Web Pages

The last recommendation is Page Vault. I have been using this company’s product for several years. What I like about Page Vault is that it is designed specifically for legal professionals, so they are speaking the same language as the attorneys I work with.

The captures from Page Vault look great and include all the metadata and secure hashing. But what separates this from other services I mentioned is that it keeps investigators out of the chain of custody of evidence and outsources the technical issues to an outside firm. So if there is a question about the authenticity of the documents, professionals at Page Vault can issue an affidavit about the screen capture process, and Page Vault can serve as an expert witness to describe the technology and storage process behind it.

I am pretty good at some things, but explaining the technology behind the capture process and technical jargon is not one of them.

So, my use case for this would be a one-off situation in which there were a few critical web pages that needed to be authenticated and saved and that may come into question down the road.

Page Vault starts at $100 per page capture, so it can get pricey depending on what you are doing.

Bonus Tools

One thing to consider when archiving web pages is saving the data to Archive.org, Archive.today or another third-party archiving site. As most of you know, Archive.org is the largest repository of historical web pages on the planet. It’s an incredible resource for so many things.

One thing you may not know, though, is that both Archive.org and Archive.today have ways that you can submit a URL to be archived onto their site. I use the Chrome extensions (Archive.org Chrome extension; Archive.today Chrome extension), where you can archive a specific page while you are on it.

I like this method because it’s permanently saved through a third party whose credibility is widely known. Having said that, you have to be careful what you are saving for these services, but you get the point.

Thanks to Steve Mason for starting up this conversation.

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/4 Comments/by

Nine ‘Secret’ Investigative Tools Every Lawyer Should Know About (2021)

(This post was originally published in May 2015 and was updated in March 2021.)

Many people working in the private investigation business share a trait: They hoard their trade “secrets.”

I guess it’s pretty common in most businesses.

I assume they think they might lose their edge if they gave them away.

The truth is that most trade secrets are not really secrets at all. As one of the great 17th-century playwrights, Jean Racine, so eloquently put it, “There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”

So, before time reveals every investigator’s secrets, I’ll reveal a few. Here are nine investigative tools that every lawyer should know about.

TLOxp

Who is this person? Where do they live? Are there any criminal records against the person? How do I get an address and a telephone number?

These are just some of the core questions that come up on a daily basis from lawyers trying to track down an individual or wanting some basic information on people.

That’s where TLOxp comes in. TLOxp for Legal Professionals is a subscription service that provides access to billions of public and proprietary records that can be used to locate people, assets and critical details such as criminal histories and phone numbers. It is an essential tool that should not be overlooked.

Seriously, it’s an absolutely indispensable resource. And if your firm is using something like TruthFinder or BeenVerified to track people down, I strongly recommend you check out TLOxp. It’s like going from a Fiat to a Mercedes.

You can thank me later.

Archive.org

The Web is a living and breathing thing. It’s constantly changing. What might be published on a website one day may be gone the next — never to be seen again. While Google may cache the most recent version of a page, it doesn’t save it forever.

That’s where the Internet Archive, aka Archive.org, comes in. Archive.org not only provides a vast digital archive of various collections, but it also keeps an archive of the Web, with over 150 billion page captures.

Archive.org’s Wayback Machine can be used to see what previous versions of websites looked like or to visit websites that no longer exist. This can come in handy if you ever need to show that a website was publishing copyrighted materials, identify former executives of a company or gather information about a website that has been taken down.

They have archived 475 billion web pages. I am no accountant, but that’s a lot.

Most people know a little about its archiving of web pages, but did you know that Archive.org has also digitized 28 million books and texts and 14 million audio recordings like radio broadcasts, and you can search the closed captions of 2 million television news shows back to 2009?

LexisNexis/Westlaw

You’re probably saying to yourself, “Every first-year law student knows about LexisNexis and Westlaw.”

It’s true.

LexisNexis and Westlaw are essential tools for every lawyer, especially when it comes to researching case law.

What many lawyers don’t know, however, is that they also have some of the largest repositories of public and proprietary information on people and businesses. Most law firms don’t subscribe to the public records portion of the LexisNexis and Westlaw databases because it’s pretty cost-prohibitive if you’re not using them on a daily basis.

In addition to their vast repository of public records on matters such as criminal histories, civil litigation, property records and other public records, these databases represent two of the single largest collections of historical news.

DomainTools

With a little know-how and in about 18 minutes, anyone can set up a website and start publishing just about anything. But getting a handle on the individuals who are behind a website can be challenging. The simplest way is to look in the Whois.net directory to see who the current registrant/administrator is. The directory can provide a wealth of information, such as the email address and contact information for the person who is behind the website.

However, it’s usually not that easy. Many Most websites are now set up with a private or proxy domain registration, especially when the registrant is trying to hide acts of wrongdoing. While you may need to jump through enormous legal hoops to uncover the site owner’s identity, there may be an easier way.

Although the Whois directory will give you the current registrant, DomainTools will give you the entire registration history for the domain going back many years. So if the domain was owned by an individual and then transferred into a proxy service, you just might have struck gold.

Since 2018, a number of privacy laws have been passed with a lot of fancy acronyms, including the CCPA and the GDPR. The bottom line is that domain information is disappearing, but as of this moment, you can still get some good decent info. 

Bonus: Alternatively, you can check out ViewDNS.info, which is a totally free option. It’s not nearly as robust, but if you want a quick, down-and-dirty way to search for a domain by a name or email address, you can check that out. 

Skopenow

The fire hose of information available via open sources and social media has expanded rapidly over the past few years. There is so much information, it’s hard to impossible to easily collect, organize and digest all of it.

That’s where Skopenow comes in.

Skopenow is a fee-based service that offers information on an individual’s social profiles, blog posts, comments, social media posts, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, court records, family members, usernames, web sightings, pictures, screenshots and timestamps, as well as an alternative name (nickname) analysis.

Running a report from Skopenow can help you connect information using any number of data points that a layperson may fail to identify or connect.

Google

I know what you are thinking. Google is so popular it’s a verb.

But most people don’t use Google to its full potential.

For example, if you are searching for information on someone, there are at least five ways to search their name:

“John Doe” – The quote marks tell Google to search the exact phrase.

“John” “Doe” – This may seem repetitive of the above search, but the above results won’t provide results with John William Doe or John W. Doe. Searching with each word in quotes will return any results containing the two quoted words or phrases.

“Doe, John” – In some cases, the name may appear last name, first name.

“J. Doe” or “Doe, J.” – This will capture cases in which the first initial, last name format is used.

“John * Doe” – An asterisk is like using a wildcard, so this will produce results that contain, for example, John Michael Doe.

There are dozens of other advanced operators. A few of my favorites are:

“John Doe” (attack OR charge OR violate OR indict OR insult OR slander OR molest OR assault OR force OR abuse OR attack OR strike OR invasion OR assail) – This is a quick, down-and-dirty negative search string to see whether there is anything really bad out there on John Doe.

site:upenn.edu “john doe” – This search string will specifically search, for example, the University of Pennsylvania’s website to determine whether the name “John Doe” has appeared anywhere on it.

Filetype:pdf “John Doe” – This will return results of the name “John Doe” appearing in any PDF files.

Dig deeper: 6 Google Tricks That Will Turn You Into an Internet Detective and 8 Google Search Tricks Every Attorney Should Know

Newspapers.com

If you are looking for current or recent news, Googling, LexisNexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, Factiva or subscriptions to local news websites are your best bet.

But if you want some historical information, like from the 1980s or before, Newspapers.com is the way to go.

Newspapers.com is a subscription-based service that contains information from over 20,000 newspapers dating back to the 1700s. It also reportedly adds millions of additional pages each month. This is a great source for finding information that may not have made its way to Internet search engines.

PACER

If a client asks me to do a quick, down-and-dirty background check on someone, one of the first places I always go is PACER.

As you probably know, PACER is a free public service that allows users access to a comprehensive index of docket information from all United States district, appellate and bankruptcy courts. All available court filings are also accessible through the site for a small fee.

There are a few reasons that it’s one of the first databases I use:

  1. It’s quick and really cheap;
  2. It’s comprehensive in that it contains almost every single federal court (I think it’s missing a few) in the country dating back at least 15 years, sometimes much longer;
  3. Many state courts don’t have copies of legal filings online, but PACER does, so you can quickly get the gist of a proceeding or disposition;
  4. Bankruptcy records can prove to be a gold mine of information.

Judy Records

Judy Records is a relatively new public online service that reports being the largest court-related search engine in the United States, consisting of dockets and opinions from 481 million court cases.

Yes, you read that right — 481 million court cases!

The best thing about Judy Records is that it is free of charge.

Keep in mind that it’s got some serious limitations. Don’t for one second think that it’s comprehensive; but if you are looking for some quick results, this is a good starting point.

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/3 Comments/by

Private Investigators: Fact Finders or Opinion Givers?

If the Internet age has taught us anything, especially in the last year, it’s that people are not afraid to share their opinions. Whether it be politics, social issues, or politics (see what I did there?), Internet message boards and social media offer platforms where anyone and everyone can make their opinions known.

As a private investigator, opining can be a slippery slope. More often than not, our job is simply to identify and present facts. We leave the judgments regarding guilt, innocence, character, emotion, well-being or state-of-mind to the client.

We are not judges, jurors, psychologists or mind readers.

We are fact finders.

In our line of work, we are often tasked with composing background reports on a variety of people for a variety of reasons. The report may be part of a lawsuit, for an investor, or for a business deal. The first rule of writing these reports is that we NEVER offer our opinion. Our job is to gather information, analyze it, and report the facts in a clear and concise manner that informs our clients and allows them to make informed decisions. The only opinion that matters is the client’s, not ours.

So, while we can tell the client that we identified dozens of photos of what appear to portray drug use with youngish women, calling the person a drug-dealing pimp is not something we would ever do.

Similarly, suggesting that someone is a loving person, “reformed,” or presuming that someone had turned around their life intimates that we are mind readers or psychologists. The truth is, we still get surprised at which facts our clients find relevant to their bottom line and which they find irrelevant.

We were recently provided a portion of a fellow investigator’s report in which the social media section was basically a reflection of how the investigator felt about the person. It contained multiple uses of the word “I” and their personal opinion on the person’s social media presence. The investigator also used descriptive terms about how they felt, like “heartbroken,” and that the person they were investigating was a “shining example for men like him.”

[Side note: Social media is the most dangerous place to start judging people, since people tend to portray their lives on social media as they WISH they were and not always as they are.]

We are not judges, jurors, psychologists or mind readers. We are fact finders.

When investigators offer their opinion, they are essentially controlling the narrative and steering the client’s opinion in a certain direction. Not only that, the investigator may provide an opinion that they are not qualified to make so that the stated opinion is worthless.

In doing background investigations, for example, our job is to identify any potential red flags or issues in a person’s past in order to assist the client in making what is essentially a very important business or personal decision. It is of zero importance if we think that the person being investigated seems like a really nice guy because he donated to a charity for his birthday or if we think that he got a raw deal in life because he seems to love his family.

Of course, if clients want our opinion, we would provide some color and context. But we leave the decision-making up to them.

Let me be clear about something—when you spend hours digging into someone’s life inside and out, you will undoubtedly form an opinion of the person, that’s just human nature. And your gut feeling may help guide you down whatever rabbit hole you end up going down. However, when you are hired by a client to create a report, your personal opinion must remain in your head and never reach the page.

This is not just true in background investigations. If an investigator is doing surveillance for insurance purposes, it doesn’t matter much if they think the person they are surveilling is not injured, it only matters what the facts and evidence say.

Similarly, an investigator may think that they are being lied to by a witness during an interview, but unless they have some facts and evidence to back that up, it’s nearly useless.

As always, we will stick to collecting and reporting the facts.

We’ll leave opinions to armchair quarterbacks and keyboard warriors.

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/5 Comments/by

8 Google Search Tricks Every Attorney Should Know

There are literally dozens of advanced Google tricks, but below we have put together a list of Google tricks that every attorney should know.

Google is an amazingly valuable tool, but most people use only about 1% of its capabilities.

Some of these tricks might be familiar to you; others may not. But the magic starts happening when you start combining these advanced searches to form some really complex searches.

So, without further ado, here are some tricks to get more out of your Googling.

1) Exact phrase

Of all the advanced search tips, this is the one almost everyone knows, and it’s easily the most useful query. Enclosing a search phrase in double quotes will return only results with the exact phrase you are looking for. This is especially useful when conducting searches on individuals such as witnesses, plaintiffs or defendants who have a common name.

If you Google a person’s name without the quotes, Google assumes that you want the words to be close together, but it doesn’t force the words to be together, which would give you more pointed results.

But the quotes can be used for more than just searching for a name. For example, if you are trying to confirm that Brian Willingham attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, you can search:

“brian willingham” “amherst”

Here is an insider tip that you might not have known: If you really want to dig into a person’s background, there are six ways you should be searching a person’s name.

For example, if you wanted to dig up information on me, Brian Willingham, the author of this article, here are six ways I would be doing it:

“brian willingham”

“brian” “willingham”

“willingham, brian”

“B. Willingham”

“Willingham, B.”

“brian * willingham”

Using all of these cases allows for the possibility of the name appearing in multiple ways: together; separated; last name, first name; first initial, last name; last name, first initial; or with a name in between (like a middle name).

This may seem repetitive, tedious and duplicative, but it’s not.

If you do the searches above, you will get different results each time.

Some of which are pretty revealing ;)

2) Excluded words

Let’s say you are trying to find information about some guy named Brian Willingham, the private investigator based in New York. But some quick Google searches reveal that there are a couple of other pretty prominent Brian Willinghams, like the guy who wrote “Soul of a Black Cop,” who is a former Michigan police officer, or the Brian Willingham from San Francisco who is a real estate agent and was in the news several years ago because his husband was about to be deported.

If you wanted to filter Google to avoid these results, you could use a hyphen (functioning as a minus sign) to exclude words from your search:

“brian willingham” -“soul of a black cop”

Or

“brian willingham” -“deportation”

Or, if you wanted to get really advanced, you could filter everything by putting it in one search string:

“brian willingham” -“soul of a black cop” -“deportation”

3) Site-specific search

The site-specific Google search allows you to search a specific website for the existence of a particular term. So instead of searching the entire Internet, you may want to home in on one website.

For example, in your research on Brian Willingham, you may want to see 1) articles that he has written for Pursuit Magazine and 2) anytime he has been mentioned on Pursuit Magazine’s website. In that case, you would search:

site:pursuitmag.com “brian willingham”

You would quickly find an author page for Brian Willingham, which provides a list of articles written by Brian Willingham.

But it also provides you with links to pages on which Brian Willingham was mentioned. 

It also provides links to comments that Brian Willingham made, which can be extraordinarily valuable.

And nearly impossible to find otherwise…

4) “OR”

The OR search is used if you are trying to search with more than one term and would like for one or both of the terms to be found. The OR must be capitalized for the search to work correctly.

So if you wanted to search multiple name variations, you would enter something like:

“brian Willingham” OR “brian * billingham”

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could put all of the name variations in one string:

“brian willingham” OR “brian” “willingham” OR “willingham, brian” OR “B. Willingham” OR “Willingham, B.” or “brian * willingham”

5) Filetype

Utilizing the filetype search, you can avoid searching web pages and isolate your research to certain types of files, such as PDFs, spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents and others.

How can this be helpful?

You may find references in annual reports, financial statements, business plans, curricula vitae, court documents or scanned documents (yes, Google is searching for words in documents too).

“brian willingham” filetype:pdf

In one case, several years ago, we were doing a filetype search for Excel spreadsheets on a company, and we found an entire list of employees and their contact information, buried on a website.

It was an absolute gold mine of information.

6) “AROUND”

There is a “secret” Google feature called the AROUND search, where you can search for terms near each other within a certain number of words. In other words, you can force Google to have two words near each other.

So if you wanted to only find results that have Brian Willingham within 20 words of Diligentia Group, you would enter:

“brian willingham” AROUND(20) “diligentia group”

The AROUND must be capitalized, and the 20 referenced above can be any number you want.

This can be helpful in cases in which you want to narrow down lots of results.

Or in cases where you are trying to link two parties together.

For example, if you were trying to link Brian Willingham to the Bernie Madoff scandal, you might try something like this:

“madoff” AROUND(30) “brian willingham”

7) INURL

This is a search that I have been using with much greater frequency over the past several years. This will find results in which the searched word only appears in the actual URL, not in the body of the text.

This is particularly helpful for finding social media profiles. For example, if you have determined that Mr. Willingham uses the apt handle “brianwillingham” on social media, you may do something like this:

inurl:brianwillingham

Or if you have figured out that Mr. Willingham really goes by the user handle “fedora_the_explora” you would do this:

inurl:fedora_the_explora

(Legal notice: We can neither confirm nor deny that Brian Willingham has used or ever will use the handle fedora_the_explora, and we can neither confirm nor deny whether fedora_the_explora is related to the “real” Dora the Explorer.)

8) Combination

THIS is where the magic happens.

You can combine these techniques above into really advanced Google searches. In really nerdy worlds, it’s called “Google dorking” or, in less nerdy worlds, “Google hacking.”

So if you wanted to find PDF files on the Diligentia Group website:

site:diligentiagroup.com filetype:pdf

If you wanted to see whether there is anything horrible out there about our friend Brian Willingham and wanted to find some low-hanging fruit, you might do something like this:

“brian willingham” (arrest OR assault OR attack OR bribe OR corruption OR criminal OR defraud OR fraud OR illegal OR indict OR investigation OR launder OR misconduct OR misrepresent OR negligence OR violation OR sanction OR terror)

Or if you wanted to get even nerdier:

“brian willingham” AROUND(20) (arrest OR assault OR attack OR bribe OR corruption OR criminal OR defraud OR fraud OR illegal OR indict OR investigation OR launder OR misconduct OR misrepresent OR negligence OR violation OR sanction OR terror)

If you wanted to find any PDF files that contain privileged and confidential information that is not for public release, you can do this:

filetype:pdf “privileged * confidential” “not for public release”

👀

Happy Googling!

Side note: While writing this, I found out a lot about myself that I didn’t know before ;-}

Dig deeper:

➔ Google Dorks on OSINTCurio.us

➔ Smart Searching with GoogleDorking

➔ Ethical Google Hacking Course

➔ Google Dorks List and Updated Database in 2021

➔ Google Search Operators: The Complete List (42 Advanced Operators)

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/1 Comment/by

The Cost of a Hiring a Private Investigator to Find Someone

“What is the cost to find someone?”

We get asked that question about 17 times a day, in one form or another.

  • How much will it cost?
  • What if I only know the person’s first name?
  • What if I only have limited information on the person?
  • Why can’t I use one of the online consumer databases (TruthFinder, Spokeo, BeenVerified, etc.)?
  • Is there a cost difference between finding a long-lost relative and finding someone to serve in a lawsuit?
  • What if I only saw the person from 82 meters away and could only draw a picture?

And so on and so forth.

We understand. At the end of the day, there is so much information out there about finding people, and you just want to know how much it’s going to cost you.

These are (mostly ;) totally normal questions, but for the most part, you will get answers like “It depends,” or end up signing up for some online database that will charge you $29 a month in perpetuity without giving you any definitive answers.

Before we get started on private investigator fees, it’s worth discussing some of the online, consumer-grade databases, as these will inevitably be part of the conversation.

A brief warning: This post is pretty epic. So here is a cheat sheet if you want the Cliffs Notes version:

  • Consumer-grade databases (e.g., TruthFinder, Spokeo, BeenVerified) are decent, but they are not always up to date and accurate.
  • Although they are not perfect, these consumer-grade databases can be good for some situations; however, for professional jobs where you don’t want to have to question the information you obtain, you should hire a professional.
  • While consumer-facing databases get their information from unregulated data, private investigators have access to professional-level investigative databases, which contain more regulated/more secure data.
  • Private investigators use databases such as TLOxp, IDI, IRBsearch (also known as Accurint), Tracers and LexisNexis, among others.
  • Private investigators must have a permissible purpose to access the information.
  • On average, most private investigators charge anywhere from $100 for standard cases to up to $500 for more difficult cases.
  • Our fees start at $500 to find a person if you have some basic information about the person, such as a full name, date of birth, recent address, workplace, area of residence, etc.
  • Our fees start at $1,000 to find a long-lost relative, friend or similar, or other cases in which you have limited, outdated or historical information.
  • We don’t offer guarantees, but we do promise that we will be completely transparent and upfront about our chances of finding the person. We don’t take on cases if we think we can’t help, and we have a really high success rate in finding people.

Are the online consumer-grade databases (TruthFinder, Spokeo, BeenVerified, etc.) any good?

At this point in your research, I am certain that you have come across one of the many online consumer-facing databases and are wondering whether they are any good. You may have even used a few of them.

With a credit card, anyone can sign up for any one of the dozens of online, consumer-grade databases such as TruthFinder, Spokeo and BeenVerified. They are quick and easy, and they are probably pretty decent for finding a portion of the population.

Are these databases any good? The short answer is that they can be decent, but that comes with a lot of caveats:

  • One is that the data is not particularly good. Based on some of our own research, these databases’ reports tend to be incomplete, not up to date and not particularly accurate. Most of these databases are pretty cheap, so they would fall under the category of “you get what you pay for.”
  • They might have some information right but other information that’s not so accurate. For example, our results showed that some of the addresses were correct, but the telephone numbers were not. Or vice versa. That can be really frustrating if you really need to get in touch with someone.
  • Lastly, based on our own experiences, some of these databases rope you into pretty hefty fees that are hard to get out of. Just a few weeks ago, we were working on a case in which we were trying to determine whether any of the consumer-grade databases had contact information for a business executive (they didn’t). But after taking two seconds to sign up, it took about two hours of phone calls to cancel the service.

(If you want to dig into this more, we suggest you take a spin through the post Intelius vs. Spokeo vs. BeenVerified — A Private Investigator’s Review.)

Although each of these databases is different, they generally contain aggregated consumer information that comes from things like forms that you fill out online and publicly available information from government records.

In simpler terms, this is unregulated data.

Can I just use one of the online consumer databases INSTEAD of hiring a private investigator?

Of course.

In fact, in many scenarios that is exactly what we recommend.

Especially for one-off scenarios, if you want to try to save a few bucks or you are pretty confident that the person can be found easily, it’s no bother if the information is not totally up to date and you don’t mind calling a few wrong numbers.

Why would I hire a private investigator then?

The short answer is you should hire a professional if you want a professional job where you don’t have to question the information you obtain.

It’s that simple.

Otherwise, there is no cut-and-dried answer. We have seen consumers, businesses and law firms use these databases with varying degrees of success. Frankly, we mostly see the results of these databases when they don’t provide the answers the clients are looking for, so our personal opinion might be skewed.

We often get these reports sent to us from attorneys who don’t have any confidence in their results. Sometimes they are right, but about half the time they are not. That’s not a great hit rate, especially in a legal matter. 

What types of databases do private investigators use?

While consumer-facing databases aggregate unregulated data, professional investigative databases generally gather the more regulated data.

There are dozens of professional-grade databases that investigators use to find people’s addresses and phone numbers. In investigative lingo, this is called skip-tracing. When we say “professional-grade,” we mean databases that (for the most part) only investigators have access to — where you need to verify that you are a licensed private investigator in order to access them. In some cases, law firms and certain businesses can access the information as well.

The reason that a license is required is that much of the information in these databases is protected by regulated data and federal laws like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCPA) and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), and in order to access this information, you need a permissible purpose.

The same way that someone can’t just pull your credit report without some sort of permissible purpose, one cannot search regulated data (which we will discuss in a bit) willy-nilly.

Here are a few of the biggest database providers of aggregated data to the investigative industry:

➔ TLOxp

➔ IDI

➔ IRBsearch (also known as Accurint)

➔ Tracers

➔ LexisNexis

➔ Thomson Reuters CLEAR

➔ Delvepoint

➔ LocatePLUS

What types of permissible purposes are there?

Federal privacy laws protect certain types of information from being released. Nearly all the commercial database providers require that you declare a permissible use under the GLBA and DPPA.

This is not an all-encompassing list, but in order to access these databases, a private investigator must show that, for example, the search complies with legal requirements (GLBA), protects against fraud (GLBA), has the express consent of the consumer (GLBA), is in connection with a litigation proceeding (DPPA) or is on behalf of a government agency (DPPA).

There are more than a dozen permissible uses under the GLBA and DPPA, which you can read more about here; but in summary, some sort of permissible use is required.

Do you need a permissible purpose to find the person?

Yes. 100%, without question.

Why?

In order to use the databases described above, a permissible purpose is required, 100% of the time, to access the protected data.

Do you need to know the REASON why you are attempting to find the person?

We can’t speak for other investigators, but in our case the answer is 100% yes.

It’s our duty and obligation to know why you are trying to find the person.

For a business, it may be to track down a former employee relating to a fraud investigation.

For an investor, it may be in anticipation of litigation.

For an attorney, it might be to find a witness for an upcoming trial.

For the general public, that answer can vary, from trying to get in touch with a long-lost relative to finding an old friend to connecting with a former acquaintance.  

As private investigators, we have some specialized skills and access to some pretty powerful information. As you can imagine, there have been some horror stories of investigators who tracked someone down with tragic results.

The most famous of these stories concerns Rebecca Schaeffer, the actress who was killed by a deranged stalker who had hired a private investigator to track her down. The killer told the private investigator that he was an old friend of Schaeffer’s and wanted her address so he could send her a gift — but he went to her doorstep and shot her.

Had the private investigator vetted the person just a bit more, they might have never taken the case and Rebecca Schaeffer would still be alive.

Do you even need to use investigative databases?

We are fairly certain that any experienced investigator can find just about anyone’s address with some ninja Internet skills and Googling ability. So, while these private investigator databases make our lives much easier in terms of making it quick and easy to find someone, they are not totally necessary.

Take a recent case we worked on where we were able to find a ridiculous amount of information on an executive.

We were tasked with finding information on an executive at a major company who had become the target of Internet trolls. The executive and the company were concerned that these Internet trolls might act upon some of their vague threats, so we were tasked with trying to identify information about the executive and his family to see what information the trolls might be able to come up with.

Without using a single investigative database, the amount of information we were able to come up with was astonishing, even for us, who have been in this business for nearly 20 years. We found out his home address, home phone number (yes, those still exist), his cell phone number, his wife’s name and cell phone number, photos of his entire family from social media, photos and the address of his second home, his mother’s and father’s names, his kids’ names, his dog’s name and even his grandparents’ names.

This information took quite a bit of time to track down without access to the investigative databases, which would have gotten us from point A to point B much quicker. Nevertheless, it wasn’t all that difficult. Just took some time — something Internet trolls appear to have plenty of.

In this case, the man happened to be a pretty high-profile executive who also had quite a big footprint in public records like property, voter registrations and political contributions.

This definitely wouldn’t be the case for everyone, but you get the point.

Can a private investigator find ANYONE?

We always tell any potential client: With unlimited time and resources, virtually anything is possible.

No matter how little information you have.

But, in reality, there is no such thing as unlimited time, and resources (money, in our case) are limited.

So, while we like to think that we can find anyone, that’s more of a pipe dream than a reality.

So, how much does it cost to hire a private investigator to find someone?

On average, we would say most private investigators charge anywhere from $100 to upwards of $500 for more difficult cases. That doesn’t encompass everything, but it captures a good portion of the cases. On the low end, that would mean someone running a database or maybe two and providing you with whatever comes up. On the higher end, that may require a bit of extra legwork.

How much do we charge?

You have arrived near the end of this post, and you may find yourself wondering, well what the heck do WE charge?

These cases can typically be broken down into two categories:

  • Cases in which you have limited information on the person (for example, only a piece or two of identifying information such as a full name, address, date of birth) or information that is dated or really scarce. For example, if you are trying to find a long-lost friend, military buddy or relative, and you have only that person’s relatively common name, approximate age and that’s about it. 
  • Cases in which you have recent, more comprehensive information, such as a person’s name and a recent address or date of birth, or simply a name and company. For example, if you are trying to find a former employee at a local business who moved away or if there is someone on Facebook whom you want to track down.

Diligentia Group fees to find people

Professional Desktop Research

Fee: $500 (flat fee)

Our initial approach is to identify addresses and contact information from professional-grade investigative databases. We utilize multiple cutting-edge investigative databases that aggregate information from a multitude of sources, including credit headers, utility records, public records and open sources, to identify address and telephone number information.

We then analyze the data and provide the best possible address based on other supporting information, such as utility, voter registration, property ownership or driver’s license records. We aren’t just giving you a data dump of the first information we find; we are carefully and thoughtfully analyzing the information so we can give you the best known address.

We will also provide the best known telephone contact information. While in most cases we will provide telephone contact information for the person you are looking for, in some instances, that may not be available, so we may provide you with the contact information of a close relative.

These records are generally reliable; however, they are not always 100% accurate or up to date and may require additional research, such as on-the-ground work. Additionally, while this may be adequate for the vast majority of people, in some cases, people are much more difficult to find. These can include people who move frequently, are running from the law or are in serious financial trouble.

Deep Research and Telephone Inquiries

Fee: $1,000 (flat)

This is for cases where Professional Desktop Research just won’t cut it — the ones that provide more unique challenges and call for deeper research, telephone inquiries and scouring of public records.

In these cases, we will make additional telephone inquiries, such as calling employers, neighbors, adversaries, distant family members or colleagues, to try to get a sense of the person’s whereabouts. This will be done in combination with taking a deeper dive into public records to identify any potential upcoming court appearances, tracking their social media accounts to triangulate their whereabouts, identifying recently registered vehicles and determining whether they recently set up a new business.

In this phase, depending on the intelligence developed, we may conduct an on-site visit to find the person and/or make a few inquiries.

Bespoke Investigation (Long-Lost Relative / Limited Information / Under the Radar)

Fee: $1,000+ ($150 to $250 per hour)

We use this phase for the cases that are hard to wrap up with a nice little bow.

This kind of investigation is saved for those who are seriously living under the radar; and are more complex than a Deep Research case. They typically require specialized databases, creativity, thoughtfulness, some elbow grease and a tailor-made plan; and just about every tool in our tool belt. And more often than not, they require some actual boots-on-the-ground work.

In terms of finding a long-lost relative or friend, we have had a lot of success with these types of cases in the past. Our favorites include the story of Yvette Ferrari, who spent 45 years without knowing her father — until we found him — and the story of Tucker, who was reunited with his father, who didn’t know he existed.

Some other examples our previous “bespoke” cases include:

➔ locating a person who had been homeless for 20 years, living on the streets of New York, who was due a substantial inheritance;

➔ a mother who had been living off the grid in a trailer in the middle of Oregon;

➔ a former soldier who went by the name Richard Smith (quite literally the most common name in the United States) whom a woman had met in Virginia in the 1980s and on whom she had scant details;

➔ and a businessman in Colorado who had protected his tracks so well that we needed to deliver a giant red tube to his P.O. box and wait for days until he picked it up (spoiler alert: we got him!).

Whatever the challenge is, we are up for it.

Dig deeper:

➔ Private Investigator Tips to Find a Long-Lost Friend or Relative

➔ How Much Does It Cost to Find a Person (Long-Lost Friend or Relative)

➔ Using a Private Investigator to Find a Person or Witness

➔ How to Find Someone on the Internet

Why not just use one database?

Simply put, because not all databases are created equally.

There is no ONE database that is the be-all and end-all. Some are better than others. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

At the end of the day, it’s our job to analyze all the information and intelligence and provide the most accurate information based on our experience and analysis.

Are there exceptions to these fees?

Yes, tons of them. Way too many to explain here.

If you want to find 100 people, or 1,000 people, that’s a whole different story.

If you are trying to track down an undocumented immigrant who just came into the country, or have a case that pertains to a non-U.S.-based individual (i.e., someone living internationally) or an adoption-related matter, these are different balls of wax entirely.

If you have something you want to discuss that might not easily fit into one of our categories, contact us. 

How long will it take?

For standard cases, such as tracking down an address and phone number, we will typically get back to you within a day or two.

For more complicated matters, it will take several days or weeks to complete the request.

Although this is in no way typical, in one case, we waited over a year to get results from some military requests before we were able to find the right person.

Do you guarantee you’ll be able to find someone?

Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee anything. There are just too many variables, and guarantees can lead to tremendous letdowns.

Just last month, we were asked to find someone by the name Jose Rodriguez who had previously worked at a Walmart in Michigan. He was a potential witness in a slip-and-fall lawsuit. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have enough information to track him down, and the client didn’t want to commit the amount of resources it would have taken to actually track him down. Like contacting all 82 Jose Rodriguezes who have lived near the Walmart in question or tracking down former employees of the Walmart.

However, we were upfront about our lack of confidence in being able to do it without TONS of resources, and the client was understanding.

There are dozens of other stories that follow this same pattern.

But we CAN guarantee you a few things:

➔ We will be completely and sometimes brutally honest about our chances of finding the person.

➔ Our reputation is based on providing our clients with results, not false promises. You can check out some of our feedback here.

➔ We don’t take cases that we can’t help you with.

➔ We have a really high success rate in finding people.

Final thought

If you made it this far, you’ve read (or skimmed through) over 3,461 words (including the title, if you are counting).

Congratulations.

If there was anything we didn’t answer, if something is not clear, or if you have a unique situation, you can set up a time to talk to me personally, here.

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/by

Are Private Investigators Permitted to Cross State Lines When Conducting an Investigation?

Recently, a New York–based private investigator reached out to me about conducting surveillance in a neighboring state in which he was not licensed.

So, here was the question (edited for clarity):

I am licensed in New York state as a private investigator. If there is a case that is “venued” in New York state, and the person moves to any other state, am I allowed to conduct surveillance in the other state, as long as the case is initiated in New York state?

The person was injured in New York state and there is ongoing litigation in New York state. The person recently moved to New Jersey. An attorney who I am working with is questioning the legality of initiating a surveillance in New Jersey with someone who is not licensed in New Jersey.

I have some top attorney firms that send me out of state for work, and they all say it’s legal. I can’t find a statute that says that I can work in New Jersey.

I don’t do any surveillance work, and I don’t pretend to be qualified enough to answer legal questions. But doing work in other states does come up quite a bit with fellow investigators, and my answer is pretty clear-cut: My understanding is that if you started a surveillance in New York (where the case originated) and the person drove into New Jersey, you are always OK.

When I say OK, I mean that this was not a typical situation; the person happened to drive into a neighboring state. You don’t need to stop doing surveillance because you are not licensed in that state. I don’t think any court of law is going to throw out the evidence because you happened to be driving through a state in which you were not licensed. Likewise, you will be hard-pressed to find any licensing body sanctioning someone for temporarily traveling through their state.

But if you are starting a surveillance in New Jersey, you need to be licensed in New Jersey—not necessarily where the case was filed or venued.

Each state’s licensing board wants to make sure that everyone who is operating in the state has a license and acts within the bounds of the law. It also helps protect the local private investigators from out-of-state competition.

What’s the risk if you do operate in another state?

To be perfectly frank, if you are operating in another state without a license, there is also not a whole lot of risk involved. Like I said, I have never heard of a licensing body sanctioning a firm for operating out of state. Also, there is very little enforcement going on within state regulatory bodies.

For God’s sake, absolutely nothing has been done to Black Cube, which operated in New York and all over the country on behalf of Harvey Weinstein with some extraordinarily shady and illegal tactics. And what about, in fact, the licensed private investigator who was doing the shady/illegal stuff for Black Cube? He still has an ACTIVE private investigator license and has not been sanctioned, according to a few of my sources.

BUT (there is a big BUT there), if whatever you are collecting may end up in court and may end up getting thrown out because it would not be collected by a licensed professional, you might want to think twice.

I realize that this answer may be different depending on which part of the country you are living in. For example, some states have reciprocity laws, in which you can enter a neighboring state as long as it’s temporary. As far as I am aware, there is no reciprocity agreement between New York and New Jersey.

Because I was not completely satisfied with my own answer, I reached out to a few New York–licensed private investigators, who also happen to be attorneys, who added some excellent points.

Most legal practitioners know little about private investigator licensing

In the original question, the private investigator pointed out that he works with some top attorney firms that have sent the investigator out of state and that employ lawyers who say it is legal. On that point, your typical legal practitioner knows little about private investigator licensing. David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner, who at the time was one of the top lawyers in the country, hired the firm Black Cube for Harvey Weinstein. Not only was Black Cube doing all kinds of unethical things, but it was sending operatives all around the United States, to places where they do not have offices, let alone any licensing. 

As an attorney, if it was a case that could potentially go forward in either state, I would also want to be sure I had someone licensed in each state. The risk seems pretty minimal in most cases, but it really only takes one bad situation for it to come back and bite you in the a$$.

State statutes will probably not be helpful

State statutes relating to private investigator licensing typically will have some language that requires you to have a private investigator license if you are conducting/engaging in investigative services for a fee in that particular state. So, in this case, if you are in the act of conducting or engaging in investigative services for a fee in that particular state, you need to be licensed. I don’t think you will find a specific state statute that says, “You can’t come into New Jersey if you are licensed in New York.”

Case law

There is, perhaps, some case law that will support crossing state lines, but I am not aware of any. If anyone in the investigative community knows of any, please let me know.

What if you need to cross state lines?

First, I would check the local state reciprocity agreements, as well as local licensing. For example, North Carolina has limited reciprocal agreements with seven states and California has reciprocity agreements with five states, but in California you have to fill out a form and notify the state. New York, as far as I know, does not have any reciprocity agreements.

Many investigative firms will hire a local investigator in the local jurisdiction, and have one of the investigators from out of state tag along. This offers protection with regard to local licensing laws. This would typically be in a situation in which you needed to conduct interviews, especially in cases with some complexity, and for which getting a local investigator up-to-speed would be difficult. Or cases in which the investigator from out-of-state has some institutional knowledge of a case that might be hard to replicate.

Having said all of this, I don’t think that crossing state lines in every situation requires you to jump through hoops and to get a license. For example, if I am going to pick up some court records in Connecticut, doing some historical news media research in a library in New Jersey or dropping off a request to a police station in Pennsylvania, I am all set; I personally would not be worried about being licensed in that state in any of these scenarios.

But, if at any point in your out-of-state work you are considering doing interviews, surveillance, witness canvassing, scene photographs, “door knocks,” or any other activities that would be considered (or even may be considered) under the private investigator law (I am thinking of things like computer forensics) in a state in which you are not licensed, especially for a case that may end up in a court of law, I would be sure to consult with an attorney.

Enjoyed What You Read?

Join 2,000+ others to get insider tips and tricks delivered to your inbox from what has been voted the best blog in the investigative industry!

/8 Comments/by

ABOUT US

WHO WE HELP

RESOURCES

CONTACT US

© Copyright – 2026 – Diligentia Group Inc.

Diligentia Group Inc.
© 2026 Copyright