The One Real Reason (+ Four More) Why This Private Investigator Won’t Do Bank Searches

I’ve written many times about public misconceptions of our industry, including that some folks think all private investigators do surveillance, mostly on cheating spouses. They imagine us in the bushes with binoculars, spying on people.

The other thing we supposedly do all the time is find bank accounts all over the world and dutifully report this information to our clients, no questions asked.

I don’t do surveillance work. I did, quite some time ago, but it’s just not my thing.

For very different reasons, I never have—and never will—perform any kind of bank searches. I’ve written, spoken, and posted about shady operators out there who are willing to get this information. And I’ve stated repeatedly that I won’t do bank searches of any kind.

That hasn’t stopped people from asking me to, though. Every few weeks, I get an inquiry—sometimes from attorneys, fellow private investigators, or some Jane off the street who just needs Joe’s account information because he owes her money.

Legally, of course, there are ways to obtain banking information, including through permission from the account holder or through a legal authority, like a court order, subpoena, or search warrant. There is also the off chance that banking information may appear in some publicly available filing, such as a court filing, UCC filing, or the like, but it’s a rare case. Even so, the pieces of information that are accessible through permissions or public filings are generally not what people are looking for when they ask about bank searches. They are looking for the “wink, wink” bank searches where you just show them where all the money is.

I constantly see inquiries on private investigator message boards about how to get bank records and information about investment accounts. Recently, I came across a price list for an investigator offering personal or business bank account searches—for about $1,000 each.

Of course, I see the appeal in offering this service, but I just won’t do it. My answer to anyone who inquires usually goes something like this:

Let us start with the most obvious reason.

The Laws

Banks can only disclose information with proper legal authority.

The laws are pretty straightforward: There is no legal way to get bank records without proper legal authority.

The Right to Financial Privacy Act prohibits financial institutions from disclosing bank records or account information about individual customers to governmental agencies without: 1) the customer’s consent, 2) a court order, 3) a subpoena, 4) a search warrant, or 5) some type of other formal demand, with limited exceptions.

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, commonly called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, made it illegal to obtain bank information under false pretenses.

Why, do you ask, was this enacted? Because “investigators” were calling banks, pretending to be the person with the account, and obtaining financial information.

Within these laws, there are some limited exceptions. For example, GLBA allows bank searches for “State-licensed private investigators acting under court authorization to collect child support from a person adjudged delinquent.” But 99.99999% of people looking for bank records aren’t collecting child support. They are looking for some other reason.

Frankly, it’s easier and safer to just say no to all bank searches instead of playing a game of Twister to stay within the very limited permissions and exceptions. Or to describe that one time, when I was looking for a needle in a stack of needles and found a copy of bank statements in a legal filing. There just aren’t enough of the legal kind to make it worth my while. Why risk it?

There you go. That seems pretty cut-and-dried to me.

Frankly, this article should end here.

But if you want to hear more about why I keep saying no, here you go:

Ethics

My privacy standards are non-negotiable.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a world where anyone can find out how much money you have in your accounts.

That. Is. Frightening.

And it’s a scammer’s dream scenario.

It also horrifies me that some investigators put GPS trackers on vehicles instead of following them the old-fashioned way. That gets me pretty fired up, too. (Generally, GPS trackers can be legally placed on a vehicle you own, but not on anyone else’s.)

Nevertheless, a Nevada private investigator, for some reason, thought it was a good idea to put a tracker on the Reno mayor’s vehicle. He claimed it was “nothing personal,” but he’s still getting sued.

When a thing like this happens (and it happens pretty frequently), all I can think about is this: What if some creep put a GPS tracker on my teenage daughter’s car? I don’t care what the stated reason might be. In my eyes, it’s an outrageous invasion of privacy.

It’s stalking.

Period.

I get that some people may think traditional surveillance methods are also an outrageous invasion of privacy. Personally, I think there’s a big distinction here. In traditional surveillance, you’re observing someone from public spaces and finding out what they’re up to by following them—from a safe distance, using your own guts, skills, and simple tech like a camera with a long lens. But when you plant a spyware device on a car, there’s no skill and no distance; that device can follow people onto private property—24/7—and you can observe their movements the lazy way, by watching a screen in the comfort of your own creepy “batcave.”

The law defines the limits of legal surveillance by what places people can reasonably expect privacy—such as inside their homes or behind a high fence. If you’ve got to fly a drone or climb over a fence to go onto private property, you can’t legally get the shot. To my mind (and according to the laws in many states), GPS trackers violate that expectation of privacy in a similar vein.

And so do bank searches.

My privacy standards are non-negotiable.

Don’t you expect your banking information to be kept private?

But what if you, the investigator, have some really good reasons to use the GPS tracker … or access the bank account information? You’re the good guys. This is a tool you need, in order to defeat the bad guys on the other side.

When I ask prospective clients why they want me to fetch them some financial data, I get responses like: “We’re trying to find out where this creep is hiding his money, which he’s refusing to pay to his ex-wife and kids.”

I call those kinds of ethics “situational,” where the end supposedly justifies the unethical or illegal means.

I don’t subscribe to that. I have a set of legal, ethical, and moral standards, and I stick to them.

Doesn’t matter the situation.

Transparency

I don’t trust “secret sources.”

Every single person whom I have ever had the pleasure of speaking with about bank searches, and every single piece of written material I have ever seen about bank searches, have a few things in common: “We can’t reveal our source(s),” “it’s proprietary data,” and “it’s GLBA and FCRA compliant.”

They usually throw “trade secret” somewhere in there.

You might be saying to yourself, “Brian, give me a break. They’re not going to tell you how they do it!”

Maybe not. But if you can’t tell me how it’s done, and I can’t explain it to my client, I won’t touch it.

Period.

I won’t stick my head in the sand and just pretend it’s above board if I don’t know for sure.

You can. I won’t.

I can just imagine myself in front of a jury, trying to explain how I came across the bank account information that’s been submitted as evidence at trial: “I don’t know where it came from. I paid some guy to get it for me.”

How do you think that would go over in court?

But if you can’t tell me how it’s done, and I can’t explain it to my client, I won’t touch it.

It’s like paying someone for the contents of someone’s email inbox. The only way to get that data is through hacking, phishing, or some other illegal means.

Here’s the thing: Secret sources have a massive reliability problem. Is this “secret source” doing something illegal to obtain the information? Is the data fabricated? And if I have to testify about this, how’s that going to look to the judge and/or the jury?

The biggest problem is that what most PIs call “trade secrets” tend to be a thin cover for illegal activity. Just ask Anthony Pellicano. He was known as the private investigator to the stars, who could get information that nobody else could find, via means that were a Pellicano trade secret. “I don’t care how you get information,” one Pellicano attorney-client said. And then it was discovered that he was wiretapping phones, threatening witnesses, and paying off police officers for confidential information.

Pellicano served jail time.

And so did some of his clients.

Suddenly, people cared how he got the information. They cared from behind bars.

Unreliability

I wouldn’t bank on the results of these searches.

The results of these bank searches are extraordinarily inconsistent. These firms know it and set expectations low: Nearly every firm I’ve seen pitching these services has claimed that they are not 100% reliable.

This arouses a deep suspicion in me …

I admit that my suspicion is mainly anecdotal, based on stories told to me by investigators I know who have used the most notable firms in this space. In one case it was a personal matter—they were trying to find accounts for a family member. In the other case, the investigators used it for work relating to divorce and other legal matters.

For both investigators, the bank searches came up empty.

Like, zero.

No bank accounts in the entire United States.

In the case of the family member, it turns out there were two known accounts, NOT hidden behind six shell companies, that the bank account investigator simply didn’t find.

Seems like it should have been a pretty easy case—on the scale of breaking into your kid’s piggy bank versus breaching Fort Knox.

I’ve gotten my hands on how one firm does it: They use what they’re calling “proprietary software” that’s based on “algorithms” and data from “third-party providers,” which analyze the transactions and verify data. This firm claims that everyone who has written a check or transferred funds would be in the SWIFT payment system.

So if this is some legit technique, authenticated through the SWIFT system, what accounts for the big, whopping misfires my colleagues have told me about?

I am not willing to put my reputation on the line for some fly-by-night firm …

How is this “proprietary software” so unreliable?

I’m thinking of those claw machine games at seedy carnivals: The toys in the box are right there, enticing you, easily within reach. Nobody truly understands how the claw works, but you deploy it all the same. Occasionally, it fetches a treasure. Sometimes it snags some trash.

But usually, the damn thing comes up empty. 

Reputation

I’m not willing to put my professional standing at stake for an unreliable (and probably unethical) service.

Sometimes the unreliability problem leads to a false negative—a failure to locate existing accounts, say. Other times, a bank search error can actively endanger a case—and my professional reputation.

Let’s just say I happen to hire a bank search firm and pass on those results to my client.

I have no control over what the bank search firm does; I am just trying to help my client. Right?

Except that when I get the results back, it turns out that the firm I hired provided me with bank account information that didn’t actually exist.

That’s embarrassing, but it’s not your fault, of course, because it was the firm that you hired that messed up, not you. So you are not liable.

Or are you?

Does this seem far-fetched? Because this exact thing has happened on at least two occasions that I’m aware of.

In 2009, a Virginia investigator hired a California investigator to obtain information about foreign bank accounts. Despite the investigator finding two purported bank accounts in Puerto Rico, when the client ultimately tried to collect from those two bank accounts, the banks revealed that the accounts did not exist; the investigators fabricated the account information solely to turn a profit. Both the Virginia and California investigator were sued.

I don’t trust “secret sources.”

In or around 2020, a Tennessee investigator was hired to search bank accounts for a husband and wife. The Tennessee investigator hired a Texas investigator who, in turn, found over a million dollars in several overseas bank accounts in Luxembourg, Switzerland, South Africa, and other countries. The problem was this: The accounts did not exist, and litigation ensued against both the Tennessee firm and the Texas firm for providing false information.

That’s more than just embarrassing; it ties your agency to a fraud case and may get you embroiled in litigation. And this is never, ever a good marketing plan for an investigative firm.

Oh, and despite laws against doing so, there have been other private investigators charged with pretexting a bank, trying to ascertain bank information under false pretenses.

Imagine prospective high-profile clients Googling you. What do you want them to find?

In this business, reputation is everything. And I am not willing to put my reputation on the line for some fly-by-night firm …

The One Real Reason

In short, there’s really only one real reason you shouldn’t be doing bank searches: They are not legal, except in the tiny fraction of cases when they are. Sure, there may be some ethical grey areas where you might be able to ascertain some unreliable bank information, but why risk everything for those? And just in case you still need some convincing, I gave you four more reasons.

If those don’t tip the scales, I don’t know what will.

I don’t need to cheat.

But you know what? Just for good measure, I’ll throw in a bonus reason here at the end:

I don’t NEED to do bank searches.

I do very well working my cases the old-fashioned way, using my guts, skills, and simple tech—usually, a laptop and an arsenal of non-secret OSINT  tools that are legal, ethical, and transparent. To me, shady shortcuts like GPS trackers and “secret source” bank searches are cheating.

I don’t need to cheat.

I’m better than that.

And, I’ll wager, so are you.