Archive for the 'Private Investigator' Category

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Google Power User Tips

Published on October 26, 2011 in Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: .

With the demise of the unary operator, + in Google search, I went looking for a reliable list of query operators.  (In a unary operation, in a mathematical system, one element is used to yield a single result.)

Query Operators List

Google query operators must be entered in lower case. The best list I found is at Search Engine Land.  The query operator list was compiled by Stephan Spencer. This article was written before the demise of the + operator.

Google SERP URL Parameters

Google SERP (search engine results page) URL Parameters are are name/value pairs placed in the query string portion of the Google search URL.  The URL parameter most used in our office is the strip parameter in a cache search to eliminate any trace of your pageview in the visited website’s analytics.  The SERP URL Parameters article was written before the demise of the + operator.

Money Laundering on the High Seas

Published on October 17, 2011 in Odds & Sods, Private Investigator and Risk Management. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I never underestimate the creativity of crooks.  This ingenious scheme illustrates how crooks are always looking for a weakness to exploit.  In this case, the criminals insured a marine vessel and then they made a claim against that policy each month.  The claim was always lower than the premium, and the insurance company did not become aware of the fraud as they were making a profit.

The crooks had found a sure-fire way to launder money.

How to Find Out Where a Picture was Taken

Published on October 3, 2011 in Methods, Private Investigator and Search Strategies. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Most of the time, there isn’t much information available within the picture itself. However, certain smartphones (iphone) and high-end cameras have GPS built in, and geo-tag pictures. Advanced cameras also store metadata such as the model name, exposure settings, etc. Even without the location information, the Exchangeable Image File format (EXIF) info stored on the image is still useful in the evidence gathering process.

In Firefox, right click on the image and select Copy Image Location.

Go to http://regex.info/exif.cgi and paste the image location into the Image URL box. Now click on the View Image at URL button.

The next page displays EXIF info, or information on the Camera, and, if available, the GPS-based location where the picture was taken. Scroll down for the GPS info or click on the map service link in the box on the left side of the page.

Toronto Prostitution Sites

Published on September 30, 2011 in Canada, Craigslist, Methods, Private Investigator and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

As an Investigator, I often have to search for references to a certain telephone number.  A few years ago, these searches started to involve looking for a possible prostitution involvement.  This is a search for which I frequently get requests.

Doing this isn’t rocket science, so here is my current list of sites.  Of course, I have devised a way of automating the search process and I’m not going to tell you how I do that.  Just remember, you must document your search method and the results properly if this is could end-up as evidence.

Censorship: You be the Judge

Google Ad-sense sent an automated notice that their machines were going to stop serving ads because I listed the sites that we often search for telephone numbers as explained above.  Of course machines can’t read, but they can find links. Now Google is censoring content because they don’t like to place ads on anything that has links to sites that they don’t like, in this case so-called ‘adult content’.  I can understand not wanting to be involved in promoting pornography or the sex trade, but this is only a machine telling me what to write and there is nobody to talk to and no living person at Google ever read this article.

The Investigator’s Conundrum

Published on September 23, 2011 in Odds & Sods, Private Investigator and Report Writing. 0 Comments

As an Investigator, my task is to determine Who Is Who, Who Knows Whom, and Who Did What to Whom, then I have to explain all this to the client, courts, lawyers, police, and prosecutors.

Credit Scores

Published on September 16, 2011 in Odds & Sods, Private Investigator and Risk Management. 0 Comments

Experian, Equifax and TransUnion Scores on consumer credit reports:

  • Poor: 301-600
  • Good: 600-700
  • Excellent: 700-849

Two Scams Investigators Fall For

Published on September 9, 2011 in Canada, Courts and Private Investigator. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Cell Phone Pings

Some companies claim to be able to perform real-time “ping” geo-location tracking of almost any cell phone. After paying, the Investigator is told that the cell phone is being pinged but has not answered and the Investigator is out hundreds of dollars. This is not how Location Based Services work in a mobile phone network.

Canadian Criminal Records

Some companies, usually in the U.S.A., claim that they can do CPIC searches. The normal answer is that nothing was found. Of course no search of any kind was performed. They also charge for searches by province when CPIC covers all of Canada. Sometimes, the single-province searches are advertised as CPIC but actually search the provincial court case management system.

Untraceable Phone Number

Published on August 31, 2011 in Communication and Private Investigator. 0 Comments

inumbr provides phone number that you can use to forward calls to any other phone in the U.S..  If you are in Canada forward to a MajicJack.com number for a U.S. location. No one will be able to trace you with this number. This company also offers some useful call management features than can help locate callers.

ChangeIP Proxy

Published on August 1, 2011 in Communication, Methods, Privacy, Private Investigator and Security. 0 Comments Tags: .

ChangeIP, states that its Private Proxy is an encrypted change IP proxy that not only changes your IP address, but also encrypts your Internet browsing sessions to keep you safe and protected.

Perhaps this is better than Zerobank, but perhaps not, I have not tried it yet.  It may offer some utility over TOR in that it may allow viewing YouTube and similar video content, but I doubt it will offer the anonymity of TOR.

Operational Risk & Lawfare

Published on July 29, 2011 in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Private Investigator, Reputation Management and Risk Management. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Recently, I have been involved in a series of jobs involving Operational Risk.

Operational Risk arises from:

  • inadequate or failed processes and controls,
  • people
  • systems
  • external events
  • contractual obligations
  • compliance issues
  • lawfare

Lawfare is the most interesting aspect of this type of work. Lawfare is a form of asymmetric warfare that is waged via the courts with the intention of damaging the firm. Special interest groups, radicals, and competitors will use this to create financial damage and create ill will towards the targeted company.

The Investigator’s task is usually to identify the funding sources and relationship of the plaintiff to individuals and groups who would benefit from the use of this tactic.

Division of Powers — Property Rights

Published on July 20, 2011 in Canada, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Legislation and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The provinces have been granted power over “property and civil rights in the province” in Section 92(13) of  The Constitution Act, 1867.

This division of power forced the Trudeau government to remove the right to private property from the Charter of Rights when the provinces protested its inclusion. The provinces saw this as limiting their ability to tax, expropriate, and exercise control over property ownership. Neither the federal nor provincial governments are under any constitutional obligation to pay fair (or any) compensation for expropriated property. The Constitution Act 1867 and the Charter of Rights do not address this issue. Legislatures are also free to legislate away your ability to use any property for any purpose. Ontario and Quebec will probably try this route to control firearms ownership once the Long Arm Registry is eliminated by the federal government.

This is starting to backfire. Landowner associations and grass-roots movements are starting to form in Ontario and Alberta.  These groups and movements to include property rights into the Charter of Rights will become a prominent feature of the political landscape in years to come.

Blippy

Published on July 11, 2011 in Private Investigator and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Blippy allows its users to connect their bank accounts and credit cards to Blippy “to automatically or manually post your purchases so that your followers may view them.” It also syncs existing e-commerce accounts to Blippy such as iTunes, Netflix, Woot, eBay and more. Blippy will then ‘tweet’ each purchase, where it was purchased, and the cost. Many of the pictures have imbedded geolocation metadata.

The New Neighbourhood

Published on June 2, 2011 in Company Research, Due Diligence, Ethics, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites, Sources and Training & Education. 0 Comments

In the past, most investigations included ‘neighbourhood inquires’ where neighbours were questioned regarding the subject’s activities and lifestyle.

We still do neighbourhood inquiries, but over the last three decades this has produced less and less information of value, to the point that we now consider this an extraordinarily expensive investigative process.

Neighbours rarely share derogatory information or observations about the subject, and fewer still, even know the subject as most urban neighbourhoods are too transient and social contact is minimal.

Today’s neighbourhood isn’t tied to geography, but rather by Internet connectivity. The advent of virtual media has created virtual neighbourhoods that the Investigator must be adept at navigating and interrogating.

This new neighbourhood may reveal inappropriate pictures, drug and alcohol abuse, bad-mouthing of employers, co-workers, clients, and organisations. It may reveal poor communication skills and much worse – much of which is found exclusively online.

Unfortunately, inexpert interrogation and navigation of this neighbourhood has caused issues.

The ubiquity of Internet search engines and a lack of training and guidelines may put the Investigator in contravention of some laws if the resulting information creates a record of personally identifying information that is subsequently mishandled. Possession of Internet search results may impose either declared or implied responsibilities regarding the handling of the data in some jurisdictions.

A casual and undisciplined approach to Internet and social media searching raises questions regarding the competence, handling, fairness, storage, and analysis of the data. The role of the Investigator doing the searching should be clear from the outset. The sources and methods employed should also be clear throughout the search process and its reporting.

Virtual Identities

The subjects of an investigation do not line-up to tell the Investigator all his or her screen names and their related email addresses.

The Investigator must find the screen names and related email addresses from what he already knows at the beginning of the Investigation to build an online profile of the subject.

The Investigator must also recognise that screen names are often used by more than one person or a screen name may be used maliciously.

As the old New Yorker cartoon said, “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog”.

Navigation & Interrogation

The unstructured nature of data available on the Internet, and its density, creates problems for the searcher.

Google may say it found three million hits, but it will only show one thousand. The results will change depending on which version of Google searched and whence it is searched.

When searching for information about a person or company, the Investigator shouldn’t get bogged-down by search engine hits, but rather go straight to databases that have the right category of data for his purposes. This may mean searching sources not indexed by the search engines.

Google isn’t a substitute for knowledge and experience.

Mareva Injunctions

Published on May 16, 2011 in Canada, Courts, Fraud, Legislation and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: .

Named for Mareva Compania Naviera SA v International Bulkcarriers SA [1975] 2 Lloyd’s Rep 509, a Mareva Injunction is a court order which freezes assets so that a defendant cannot surreptitiously dissipate assets to prevent the enforcement of a judgment.

These injunctions are widely recognised in common law jurisdictions and such orders can have world-wide effect.  Similar provisions are now available in the rest of Europe, under Article 9(2) of the European Union Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, which was approved in April 2004.

The injunction is often granted ex parte and pre-trial based on affidavit evidence alone.  A Norwich order sometimes precedes the Mareva Injunction.  A Mareva Injunction is often combined with an Anton Piller order. The combination of a Mareva Injunction and an Anton Pillar order can be devastating to a business or professional person by freezing assets and revealing proprietary processes and data to competitors. However, this does prevent a foreign company from removing its assets from the country before a trial can take place. Today’s telecommunications makes moving assets almost instantaneous. The Anton Pillar order prevents the destruction of evidence before trial.

Norwich Orders

Published on May 11, 2011 in Courts, Fraud, Legislation, Methods and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: .

Norwich Pharmacal Order

A Norwich order is a pre-action discovery mechanism.

In Norwich Pharmacal Co. v Customs and Excise Commissioners [1974] AC 133, the owner of a patent knew that infringing goods were entering the UK, but could not ascertain the identity of the goods. The Commissioners, in the course of performing their duties, had information that would identify the imports.  Also, they had unknowingly played a part in facilitating importation of infringing goods. The House of Lords found that where a third party had become involved in unlawful conduct, they were under a duty to assist the person suffering damage by giving them full information and disclosing the identity of wrongdoers. If the third party bears expense in assisting compliance with an order, the person seeking assistance is bound to reimburse those expenses. That expense however would be reflected in an award of damages against the ultimate tort-feasors, and this be recovered after the final hearing.

Canada and the Norwich Order

The Court in Isofoton S.A. v. Toronto Dominion Bank, outlined five elements that a court should consider before granting a Norwich order.

Continue reading ‘Norwich Orders’