On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Ikea has been “spying” on its French employees between 2002 and 2012, and had paid more than €475,000 to private investigators for things such as “vetting of job applicants” or “efforts to build cases against employees accused of wrongdoing.”
The article goes on to report that the case has caused “public outrage” amongst Ikea’s employees and French consumers for privacy reasons.
Upon first glance at the article, I was a bit perplexed.
Wanting to check up on job applicants and wanting to investigate employees for misconduct is a perfectly legitimate reason to hire a private investigator. It is not only prudent to vet potential employees to make sure they are not lying about who they say they are, but I also think most employees would want to know if they were working next to someone who was charged with abusing children or had a history of violence.
And, of course, a company has the legal right to investigate its employees for possible misconduct, fraud or wrongdoing. Workplace fraud is rampant, and if you think one of your employees is committing fraud, why wouldn’t you have the right to investigate those claims?
But there is an invisible line, and in this case, that line was totally crossed.
People should be outraged.
And as a private investigator, I am outraged.
The article reported that private investigators obtained the dates of one employee’s flights from “outside sources,” details of personal bank account information and, most startling, scanned images from one former employee’s passport, obtained after someone posed as an airline worker and persuaded the employee to fax copies of her passport to claim a free ticket offer.
Any ethical investigators who have a backbone and a pulse and are worth their weight in salt would NEVER do anything of the sort.
The same investigators who would do this sort of thing would probably claim that they weren’t breaking any laws (an argument I have heard from several investigators).
“There is no law that says I can’t pretend to be someone else and get their passport information,” a rogue investigator might say.
They might be right. In the U.S., pretexting (obtaining information under false pretenses) is illegal only when it pertains to acquiring financial information from consumers or financial institutions. That’s it. There are laws prohibiting “deceptive practices,” but these laws have broad definitions.
So would it be illegal in the U.S. to pose as an airline worker and persuade an employee to fax copies of her passport to claim a free ticket offer?
Probably. Frankly, I don’t know for sure. The answer is not really clear-cut, but it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s not something I would ever do. I wouldn’t even entertain the idea. Neither should any other investigator. Period.
Many issues are black and white for private investigators.
Intimidating witnesses, pretending to be a police officer, hacking cell phones or bribing a witness are clearly on the dark side (although I guess it’s not clear for everyone).
But somewhere in between, there is a huge, undefined grey area, an area that is visited far too often.
My motto is that even a whiff of any unscrupulous behavior might undermine a client’s best interest, my reputation and my license.
Maybe other investigators should be mulling over these same things.
My question is when you pay an investigator are you entitled to some kind of report. I payed an investigator 1000 dollars for an investigation that was to take at most two weeks, now two months later I STILL HAVE NOTHING. He says he was only able to reach one witness two hours and I had payed for ten hours of work. I asked for a report of how he spent his time or where did he go even just who he tried to reach and he just says he has nothing more. In NYC can I demand at least a report. And where do I report an investigator who at this time I believe just took my money.
Not necessarily. That should have been laid out at the beginning as to whether or not you would have gotten a report. Typically we provide a report in every case, but that is not always the case.
Well…It’s interesting we tend to focus on the one detail of an Investigator’s action of pretending to be an Airline Employee solely to obtain a copy of her passport. My question would be why the passport? Name, birth date and place of birth are easy enough to find without the need to see a passport. Very little information. So if questioned in Court, he would have to explain his justification for that action before it would be deemed legal or illegal. A Police Officer can pretext when stopping a motorist asking to check for Insurance, when in reality he has suspicions in other areas.
So to me pretext is active in our everyday lives when we feel there is good justification for our piece of mind with our children, schools or adults who appear to spend time so much with them. We are all guilty of saying one thing to get around our real motive.
However, this investigator just out right lied and impersonated an employee of a company that is regulated by FAA which I’m sure would be at least a Misdemeanor if not a Felony and for what? He needs his license revoked and fined the maximum and then sued by the lady in question and by the Airline he impersonated. Hahaha!!! How about that?
Now financial statements are anyones business if they were obtained in a trash bin or trash bag. So many people today dispose of their phone bills and bank statements like junk mail and I feel that item in the article is just part of the job.
So the article on Ikea was written as usual for dramatic reading and media attention by throwing one bad apple into the barrel of good ones.
A great article Brian. Because it provokes thought.
I’m not sure about the general context of the article as it seems to suggest that “pretend(ing) to be someone else” is always wrong. If that wasn’t your intention, then where should the line be drawn? Is pretending to be an airline official really any different than any other (more general) pretext done either in-person or by telephone? Did the dates of those trips provide critical and highly relevant information?
Is it the lie that’s the problem… the reason for the lie… or the relevance of information learnt? What if *very* personal/incriminating (but irrelevant) information is learnt during a very general “innocent” pretext. Does that make doing the pretext wrong?
To be honest, I don’t know. I generally go by gut instinct as to what’s right/acceptable and what isn’t. But, I’ll have to give some thought to how to define this issue better.
It’s an excellent question Jarris. I don’t really have a great answer. I don’t think pretexting is *always* wrong, but you are right, where is that line?
There are a couple of areas that I would draw a very distinct line; anything related to banking or financial information, phone records or medical records and any information in which the pretext involves pretending to be the person you are trying to information about. There are many other things I would put in that category as well, but for me, there is a distinct line with these types of things.
In my mind, the relevance of the information should never be a factor. It may obtain extremely relevant information that I get someone texts to another person, but that doesn’t make it right. And what if those texts did not have any relevance or significance?
I never thought about it out loud, but this is the way I look at it: if I had to testify about the information I obtained, would a reasonable person / judge / jury think that it was some type of invasion of privacy? Which is why I think things like GPS trackers are out of bounds as well.