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Private Detectives, Technology and Undercover Work

Private Detective London gets involved in many different kinds of case. This week I’m looking at a chase that is exactly the kind of thing we do, and something that wouldn’t be part of our activity for very London specific reasons.

Football, Fraud and Private Detectives

First, the court case being brought against Delroy Facey, a former West Bromwich Albion player, charged with rigging football matches across the globe. The National Crime Agency (NCA) brought the case against Facey after involving a private detective in their investigations. Why would they do that?  Very simple – it was the work of the private detective, and the revelations published by a national paper, that got the NCA involved in the first place.

As the BBC reports, Facey was the middle man for a scheme that  resulted in multi-million pound fraud around the world, leading to match fixing such as scoring own goals, giving away penalties or getting booked and sent off the pitch. Several people have already been found guilty and sent to prison in this large fraud case.

In such evidence gathering stages, a committed private detective is much more likely to be able to obtain the necessary information for a national agency to act upon – because teams like Private Detective London have natural ways of inserting themselves into scenarios and situations that lead to complete acceptance.

 

drone survellance london

London – A No Drone Zone

On the other hand, the work of Chris Wright, a private detective in California USA, is fascinating but only on a professional level, as one investigator to another. She uses ‘eyes in the sky’ or drones to conduct aeriel surveillance. Now that might work in the USA but the law in the UK is that the operator of a drone or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) must have line of sight of the vehicle. This means 500 metres. So far the London police have not prosecuted any of the tourists (mainly Korean and Japanese for some reason) they have found flying drones above the city, although they do impound the drones which can be quite a loss, as they can cost anything from £600.00 to several thousand pounds.

So for us, interesting as this might be, drone based detection is not going to be part of our armoury for the foreseeable future. Fortunately we have skilled and experienced teams of private detectives who are used to getting up close and personal with unsuspecting subjects!

Private Detectives and Debtor Tracking

The City of London is known for many things – the Inns of Court, the London Stock Exchange, the Lord Mayor’s Parade.

It’s also known as a hub of finance and that’s a large area of investigation for Private Detective London. Whether we’re talking about the massive fraud conducted by financial institutions or chasing down a debtor who has skipped out on paying the rent, finance is generally one of the key reasons for us to be asked for tracing services.

 

Oddly enough, when finance is involved, many of our clients seem to feel a kind of shame or embarrassment when they first approach us to discuss how we can help them with trace a missing person. There’s a good reason for this. Most financial fraudsters operate by becoming very close to their victims – a Ponzi scheme depends on the scammer becoming a friend, so that formal evidence of accounting just doesn’t feature in the relationship – so they don’t just steal money, they trade on the basic decency of the people they dupe.

As a private detective London has shown me that there tend to be patterns to many of these schemes. While we work hard to track down fraudsters and bring them to justice, the truth is that the shame our clients feel does go away, when they have the satisfaction of bringing the fraudster to book, and we’re always delighted when we can help put a financial scammer out of business.

 

So our advice is to watch out for:

  • Private company letterheads … anybody can create a good logo
  • Delays in getting your money out of an investment
  • Vague descriptions of where the money is being invested such as ‘stocks and shares’ or ‘currency trading’.

If you are in any doubt, protect yourself by:

  • Asking to visit the offices where the company is based – a legitimate organisation will have some centre of operations you can examine, no matter how modest
  • Demanding the business phone number and calling it without warning – if your ‘top notch’ financial adviser answers the phone rather than a receptionist or secretary, be worried!
  • Checking people out with reputable trade bodies.

The other kind of financial fraud is much lower key and involves people who don’t pay a couple of months rent then do a moonlight flit, or those who buy something in instalments and don’t finish paying for the goods they’ve had. While this can be a much smaller sum of money, it can still be significant to the person who’s lost out – even more, they can feel a sense of injustice that their good nature has been traded on.

In such circumstances investigation services can help. Working out of a hub in the capital city, we can trace individuals and provide evidence across the UK and abroad. This helps our clients in two ways – first they often get their money back, and second their sense of justice and self esteem is restored because they didn’t allow a petty criminal to get away with it.

Private Detective London – the real world of private investigations

Two days to solve an eight year mystery

Every so often the reports of investigative work that come across my desk make me sit up straight! When I read of a London investigator who’d solved a murder case in 24 hours, I was completely boggled. But it turns out that the case, which includes Putney Road in Brixton and an East London private detective isn’t a British story – it all happened in South Africa! However, it did get me thinking because the tragic story of the death of Alec Steenkamp reveals why so many people hire Private Detective London to help them with their corporate investigations, London or worldwide, or with personal or matrimonial problems.

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PDL blog-old

Welcome to the PDL blog. In this space we talk about the wider (and wilder!) world of the private detective, whether that’s Private Detective London or cases from around the globe.

 We examine new legislation, look at changes in best practice and explore private detection industry facts, figures and breaking stories.

Just as we do with our investigations, we maintain a strict confidentiality about our clients and the cases we undertake, using only salient facts with details changed to conceal the identity and preserve the anonymity of those involved.

We do this for two reasons. First we’re proud of our record, whether we’re talking about the demanding activities of our Tracing Services, the painstaking fact-checking and data-gathering undertaken by Due Diligence or the complex and sensitive nature of the work undertaken by Matrimonial Investigation

Second, we know that anybody who’s seeking a private detective needs reassurance and confidence. Instead of making exaggerated claims about our work, which can’t be validated by potential clients, we’ve committed to:

  • keeping people informed about our work
  • sharing best practice about changing legislation
  • celebrating the work of our profession, internationally.

We believe this is the best way to demonstrate our consistent, ethical, focused approach to private investigation and to communicate our professional experience as a busy private detective agency at the forefront of work in the UK’s capital city.

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