Archive for the 'How to Become a Professional Private Investigator' Category

Investigators & the Investigative Process

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 23, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods and Private Investigator
. 1 Comment

Sherlock Holmes with his deerstalker hat and magnifying glass is the most familiar image of the Investigator. However, this is a narrow-minded representation of the Investigator.

The investigative process does not belong to the police or private detective.  Investigation is at the heart of every human activity. Scholars investigate. Antique dealers and appraisers investigate. Investors investigate. Medical Doctors investigate. In one way or another, we all investigate something or other. To investigate is to seek a solution. It is the application of information collection skills,  logic, and analytical skills.

This is the last article of 2009.  The next article will appear on Google-Free Wednesday, 6 January 2010.

Internet Detective 105 - Paid Monitoring Services

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 9, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Social Sites
. 2 Comments

Social Media Monitoring

As an Investigator, you must realise that even the Vatican uses social media. Some forms of social media are taking on some of the characteristics of email. This information rich environment is something that Investigators and Researchers must understand. To be effective, one must also understand the tools available to conduct thorough research of the social media content.

One must also be able to create accurate budgets for this type of research. To set-up, optimise, and monitor research feeds that cover multiple social media and news sites can take many hours. These services allow one to monitor the social media space for new data or derogatory content. One particular strength of these services is that they search Blog comments, and can track comments and posts of individual contributors. While these services are aimed at PR agencies, they also offer significant utility for the Investigator, but they can be very expensive tools to use.

Techrigy

Techrigy (pronounced tek-err-jee) offers a free account that gets you up to 5 Search Words/Phrases, and store up to 1000 results. This is a great way to learn how to use the system.

Radian6

Unfortunately Radian6 is expensive — you pay just to have it in your toolbox, and then pay more for each social media research project you undertake. These costs must be understood at the outset and budgeted into the costs of the Investigation.

Filtrbox

Unfortunately, at Filtrbox their annual fee for individuals appears to be $1,000USD.

Backtype

Backtype lets you search comments that mention a brand, company, or topic, but it also lets you search comments left by a particular person.

Attaain

AttaainCI costs $150 per month for unlimited searching and monitoring. It’s less sophisticated than Radian 6 and Filtrbox which rate Blog comments from positive to negative. This is aimed at the Competitive Intelligence professional rather than the PR agency.

Internet Detective 104 — Forums, Boards, & Social Sites

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 7, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Social Sites
. 0 Comments

Searching Boards, Forums, and Social Media sites can be a hit and miss affair using the large search engines. Google does an excellent job, but it is not the only game in town.

BoardTracker

BoardTracker – searches across 37,000 forums representing more than 63 million threads. Set up your own custom alerts using RSS or use the site’s search function.

SocialMention

SocialMention – this will find your search term in many different blogs and social outlets.  It will tell you how many times a keyword was used, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV file.

Internet Detective 103 - Monitoring Changes

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 4, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

In Real-time Search Engine,  I looked at a Meta search engine called Colecta that is useful for real-time monitoring certain types of sites. Now I will look at monitoring changes in sites that interest you.

Copernic Tracker

Copernic Tracker – automatically looks for new content on Web pages, forums, and Social sites. When a change is detected, our Web site tracking software can notify you by sending an email, including a copy of the Web page with the changes highlighted, or by displaying a desktop alert.

WatchThatPage

WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them. The service is free!

Internet Detective 102 — Pipes

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 2, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

Yahoo Pipes  is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

Yahoo Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. A Web mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one Web data source into a single integrated Web application. Yahoo Pipes combines several different data sources but is generally not sufficient to create a useful application, it is a data mashup tool rather than a complete mashup editor.

How-to videos abound to act as tutorials on using Pipes. The best I found was here. You might also read Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required.

Internet Detective School 101

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on November 4, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources
. 0 Comments

Google Alerts

We all know know and love Google, but how many people use its best investigative features? Investigations aren’t done in one day so why search Google on only one day?

Google Alert service is free and it allows you to create custom RSS feeds using Google search results, or you can receive the alerts by email.  Thus, if you create focused searches using phrases, site qualifiers, etc. in Google, you now can have those results as a RSS Feed.

Login to you Google account, then use the advanced query options to construct your search.  Select the Feed setting in the “Deliver to” column to activate your RSS feed.  It’s that simple; there is no need to program a Google API. Alternatively, select email to have the results sent to you by email.

Your search can be set-up to notify you as the new data appears if you select email notification. You may select as-it-happens, daily, or weekly. Simply make the selection in the “How often” column. Of course the RSS feed option doesn’t need to be told when to send you the results, it captures new data as it appears and publishes it in the feed.

To receive the feed you will have to wait until it is populated with some results. Once there are results in the feed, you may then click on the feed link for the Alert and copy the URL into your newsreader.  This takes about one day to occur in my experience.

Internet Detective School

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on November 2, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources
. 0 Comments

Internet Tracking

Mantracker hunts people by following their spoor for a popular TV show.

On the Internet, Investigators have to do the same thing. However, the digital spoor may be on a computer in Singapore while your prey is in Corner Brook Newfoundland.

For this series of articles, the terms tracking, monitoring, and alerts  all mean the same thing. These terms are applied to methods of collecting new information as it appears in a variety of searches of many sources throughout the Internet.  This is a systematic way of locating information about a subject as it becomes available. These are sources and methods that monitor news reports, social media, blogs, or other open sources of information relevant to your investigation. I will illustrate how to construct the search statement and get the results in your hands on an ongoing basis.

I will start with the large search engines and move onto the lesser know sources and methods.

Quantity Over Quality

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on August 4, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, News and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

In the past US security clearance investigations were falsified. Now we learn that they have too many background checks to do, and not enough time to do them and the solution is to produce factually correct but incomplete reports. We also see that this job is a “shredder, and agents are grist for the mill,”.

 “This job is a shredder, and agents are grist for the mill,” said K.C. Smith, an OPM investigator in Austin, Texas, with 23 years of experience. “There are people who are getting sick, under a lot of stress, their family life is suffering. They are just beat down.”

Investigators say it is common practice to spend nights, weekends and holidays writing up reports, and some don’t report the overtime they work for fear it will be held against them in their performance evaluations.

 Investigators say it is common practice to spend nights, weekends and holidays writing up reports, and some don’t report the overtime they work for fear it will be held against them in their performance evaluations.

Some say their superiors have made it clear that the priority is to close cases, and they say they have felt pressure to turn in even incomplete cases that lack crucial interviews or records if it will help them keep their numbers up. A recent Government Accountability Office report found that the Defense Department’s security clearance process is plagued by such incomplete cases: 87 percent of the 3,500 initial top-secret security clearance cases Defense approved last year were missing at least one interview or important record.

Investigators are rewarded for investigation reports, not for doing proper investigations.

The Autodidact Private Investigator

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on April 3, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Private Investigator and Training & Education
. 1 Comment
Autodidact (au·to·di·dact , ȯ-tō-ˈdī-ˌdakt, noun) is a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.A private investigator, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigations.

The economic downturn has left a lot of Private Investigators moaning about a lack of work. That’s an economic hardship, if you haven’t planned for it, but it is also an opportunity. Now is the time to learn some new skills. Here are two great blog articles on how to go about it:

The Cheapskate’s Guide to Educating Yourself

How to Set Up Your Personal University

Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on March 20, 2009
in Communication, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

Poor writing is not a recent problem. In 1946, George Orwell wrote his essay, Politics and the English Language, about his five rules of writing effectively.  Orwell concluded that if you follow his five rules, then you would distinguish yourself by clearly communicating your ideas.

Orwell’s Rules

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech seen in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Fact Checking

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on February 13, 2009
in Communication, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

Every writer, reporter, and investigator should read the article entitled Checkpoint by award-winning author John McPhee in the Feb. 9-16, 2009 issue of New Yorker Magazine . The abstract is available, but you must be a subscriber to read the full article online. Of course, you could go to the library and read the article, or just buy the magazine.

How to Become a Professional Private Investigator VIII

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on January 14, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator
. 2 Comments

The professional Investigator of today has made the transition from the car, a pocketful of coins for the payphone, and the office cubical, to working from home using computers, the Internet, and sophisticated mobile telephones. When I started, video cameras, PCs, the Internet, and cell phones didn’t exist.

Yet with all these wonderful tools, I am amazed at the poor quality of work  produced by so many private investigation firms. It is easy to accept this as the norm. Unfortunately, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why this happens. I also have the laboratory in which test my theories. I use Investigators and researchers around the globe, and get to ask them a lot of questions about how they operate. I’ve come to some conclusions that might be useful to you.

Competence and Operating Procedures

I believe what distinguishes a good Investigator or Investigation Agency from the bad ones is how they accomplish the minutia of day-to-day interaction with clients and the day-to-day problems of maintaining and operating the technology they use to produce the deliverable. Accomplishing these small details involves planning, complex coordination, and skilled management, but it is also relies on the effectiveness of many people competently performing many small components of the job . The differences in quality arise from the variance in competence  between ordinary Investigators, Secretaries, and Managers, and to the efficacy of their respective standard operating procedures.

A high quality deliverable does not require a larger-than-life Investigator, but rather a well-designed system staffed by competent people.

How to Become a Professional Private Investigator VII

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 22, 2008
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

Good detectives know how things work. That is what makes them effective. This applies to both the private and public sectors. The police detective has to know how the criminal justice system works. The Private Investigator has to know how the civil courts, business, and the economy works.

Functional Research

This knowledge of how things fit together and function  builds on previous knowledge and allows you discover how new things work. Researchers call this Functional Research. However, doing functional research requires broad knowledge in a wide variety of subjects to understand how things might fit together or complement each other.

Economics

An understanding of the economic forces that have shaped our world will serve you well in learning how government, courts, and businesses work. Our laws, customs, and institutions are built upon a foundation of economics.

Economics is not difficult to understand. It can be reduced to the interplay of four factors:

  • Wealth
  • Power
  • Distributive justice (a value judgement)
  • Impersonal efficiency

The following list of books should be read in order:

  • Diamond’s
  • Cameron & Neal’s
  • Landes’s
  • DeSoto’s
  • Ferguson’s

These books cover a lot of ground. They start with why a lack of natural resources prevented economic and technological growth in some areas of the world and move onto the political factors that shaped that growth. Then in Landes’s work, why some nations fail to live up to their economic potential. DeSoto’s book is absolutely necessary for an understanding of why property rights are so essential to economic growth and why established property registration systems have created a huge divide between the rich nations that have such systems and poor nations that don’t. Finally, Ferguson will explain the origins and evolution of our finance system and financial institutions.

How to Become a Professional Private Investigator VI

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 15, 2008
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

A Private Investigator often deals with business issues, but often the PI does not have a real understanding how the economy works or how companies function.

The best guide for understanding how companies work that I have come across is Charan’s where the author describes the universal principles that help all companies make money. This book is too simplistic for CEOs , but to readers on the lower and middle rungs it offers useful insights into how companies function and prosper or fail.

How to Become a Professional Private Investigator V

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 1, 2008
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

Assholes, Bullies, and Psychopaths

Being a professional Investigator entails dealing with troublesome people.  To be successful, you must recognise the various sub-types of these annoying creatures and learn to deal with them. Beware, they might be co-workers or your boss. I suggest you read the books in the order presented.

Assholes

Sutton’s grew from a famous article in the Harvard Business Review and expounds upon an irrefutable fact: the workplace is plagued with assholes. Assholes deliberately belittle co-workers and focus their aggression on the less powerful. They decrease productivity, force qualified employees to quit, and harm a business’s prospects.

It is extremely important for PI’s to recognise the asshole in his native habitat. If the asshole is in your company, then you have to consider how he or she will affect your earnings. PI’s in Canada are generally paid a portion of the hourly billing plus mileage and expenses. An asshole in charge can really drag down your earnings.

Intimidation

Ringer’s was originally titled, Winning Through Intimidation. This has been a best seller for over 30 years for a reason. It details the methods the business people use to intimidate people with whom they conduct business. Don’t spend a red cent on any expensive courses at Screw U – get this book instead.

Psychopaths

Babiak and Hare’s is about the successful psychopath. The successful psychopath wants money, power, or just a fancy car, and he knows how to get it from you. This book isn’t about clones of Hannibal Lecter,  it’s about psychopaths being attracted to the high-risk high-profit areas of our capitalist economy. This is a must-read for the Investigator. It will help you recognise psychopathic behaviours in the environment where you will most often encounter these behaviours.

Hare’s previous book, explains that psychopaths are neither sociopaths nor psychotics. Psychopaths are people who are well aware of the difference between right and wrong, but choose to ignore the distinction. It is also important to understand that the “psychopath” and “antisocial personality disorder” (a psychiatric term defined by a cluster of criminal behaviors) are not the same thing. Not all psychopaths are criminals and not all criminals are psychopaths.

The final chapter, “A Survival Guide,” is especially important as psychopaths are found in every segment of society, and there is a good chance that you will encounter them regularly as an Investigator.

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