When not at work, I like to do many things, and one of my favorites is to watch New York Mets baseball. Since moving to New York I’ve grown to love the team and I make common cause with the many Mets fans I run into (even in my Bronx neighborhood just a few stops
Beware of Optical Illusions in an Investigation
Many of us love optical illusions. It’s a safe thrill to know we’re being tricked, and yet are still unable to tell our brains to “get real” and stop the illusion.
When you’re doing an investigation, the same kind of thing can take over
Five Questions to Ask an Investigator Before Hiring
Where do you start in deciding which investigator to hire for a sensitive job?
It should be a business of trust, just as it is when choosing someone to come up with an estate plan, to sue a former business partner, or to handle a complex tax situation. Despite the
Angel Investor Due Diligence: The Key Trait You Want
I’ve done a lot of interviews about people over the years, but you can always get better.
A fascinating conversation last week with an angel investor about what he looks for in a candidate to run a new company gave me a question I will always ask from now on, but not just about people
Why Does My Investigation Cost $2,400? A Breakdown of a Typical Bill
After years in business, one of my biggest marketing challenges is still explaining to potential clients why an investigator can’t just use a few mysterious databases and “deep Googling,” as one hopeful person described it, and produce an answer in an hour or two.
Someone’s well-hidden assets? The eight-month job in 1998 that ended badly
The Ethics of Handling Stolen Data from the Dark Web
We were asked recently about the ethics and legality of Dark Web searches, increasingly part of many investigations. I realized we had never posted on this issue and it’s about time.
Since a lot of what we use from the Dark Web is stolen information, can we make use of it?
In short, the answer
Public Record Sources for Free – What Any Investigator Can (but May Not) Tell You
Investigators get information in exchange for money, so why in the world would an investigator want to tell people how to get that information for free?
As I wrote last week on our companion blog, The Divorce Asset Hunter in an article called Giving it Away is Great for Business, it’s not a matter
The Problem with Just Connecting the Dots: They’re in Motion
It’s one of the tried and true ways investigators have to explain their work. “Connecting the dots.”
What we usually mean is that in a sea of data, we can find the relevant material and put it in the right context by showing how it relates to other facts.
You sometimes end up with a
Deed Fraud: Preying on the Most Vulnerable
The longer you investigate people, the more bad behavior you will be able to talk about. But there is little I have encountered in my work that is more sickening than deed fraud – the subject of a recent case we had.
A form of identity
Getting Closer to the Truth
What conveys the truth more effectively?
A snapshot of a person’s values and accomplishments in the form of a quotation? Or a long essay about that person that will contain the short clip but surround it with other facts that could contradict or water down the single line (or build on the quote and infuse