pdldevv2

Who’s Listening In? Why you might want to consider a bug sweeping service

August 9, 2016 by pdldevv2

Corporate espionage and bug sweeping services might seem like the stuff that blockbusters are made of, but while the gun-toting heroes and simpering heroines with a backbone of steel are very much the remit of Hollywood, the fact remains that espionage is a very real threat in today’s business culture. And it’s not just business premises which make the prime targets.

Bugs can be freely purchased at a range of stores; compact and discreet, they can be installed practically anywhere. This means that if you are a target of surveillance for any reason, your office, your home and your car could all be subject to bugging. And you may never even know about it. It’s something of a disturbing thought. Especially when you factor in the advent of high speed internet and the wealth of hardwired solutions which have sprung up around it, hijacking your own technology and using it to relay confidential information to unwelcome sources. It’s hardly surprising then, that the demand for bug sweeping services is on the rise.

So those are the facts, but what can you do if you think that you’ve been bugged?

The first step is to remove yourself from the environment that you’re suspicious of until the bug sweep takes place. If you can’t take yourself completely away, remain alert and ensure that nothing that you would not wish to be openly known is said or done within that vicinity.
Secondly, seek help from a professional. PDL surveillance professionals will visit your premises for a comprehensive bug sweep, employing military-grade training and techniques to search all liable areas. We won’t make a big song and dance about it, waving around bleeping devices and looking concerned; we’ll simply get on with the job quietly and professionally, until all areas of potential threat have been eliminated.
While you’re waiting for the bug sweep to happen, try to avoid using your telephone – landline and mobile. For any private or confidential calls, seek out a local payphone. This is particularly important when reporting your concerns to PDL.

Anyone can become a victim of surveillance for any reason: a business competitor may be seeking the edge with inside information; a spouse (or ex-spouse) may be looking for ammunition to leverage a better divorce deal; a colleague could be trying to cover their own tracks by keeping an account of yours.

Do you need bug sweeping services in London

At PDL we have counter surveillance experts from all fields, and our confidentiality is guaranteed. If you have any concerns about who is listening to you, call us today; we’re ready to help: +44(0)203 747 1865.

Why should I hire a private investigator and what can they do that I can’t?

May 19, 2016 by pdldevv2

At Private Detective London we often get asked what a private investigator does, and why a professional private detective is a better bet than doing your own investigations. Here are some of the questions we answer regularly for our investigation clients.

How do private detectives find out information I can’t find myself?

There are a number of ways this can be done. There are subscription databases not available to the general public, there is the private detective’s own network and contacts who may share information with him or her that they wouldn’t give to others and there is the large role that on-the-ground investigation plays in uncovering facts and exploring leads. Above all though, private investigators have the training and experience to look at information and see a pattern that can be pursued to a successful conclusion.

Why is it better to use a recognised private detective agency?

A professional private investigator with a substantial track record in successful cases will be a real advantage in a number of ways. First, that detective’s evidence-gathering, and if necessary court testimony, will be invaluable. Their reputation will back up your case and support you arguments. Second, a top-class private detective will have a huge network of contacts and colleagues they can call on to support your case. These two reasons alone make it vital to know who is handling your case – inferior agencies outsource their work to private detectives who have little or no training or experience, leading to inadmissible evidence and no ability to investigate your concerns on a professional level. We only work with our in-house team, whose skills are high and whose probity is unmatched.

What can’t my private detective do?

Although we may have the ability to access information not available to the average person and although our surveillance and counter-surveillance skills are exceptional, there are still things we can’t do, even though TV detectives do them all the time!

We can’t:
• Pretend to be policemen or members of the emergency services
• Tap phones
• Obtain phone, bank or computer records by lying or hacking
• Trespass on private property.

Will my investigator just repeat the police investigation?

No. The police have one way of working and private detectives have another. Police officers, for example, may have a number of cases at a time and must divide their hours between them all. An experienced private detective will be working on your case with focus and commitment, not side-tracked to do paperwork or even forced to take annual leave in the middle of a complex investigation or surveillance!

Will my private detective be legal?

Absolutely yes.We ensure that all our investigations comply with the law in every regard in whatever country and jurisdiction our private detectives find themselves in.

Would you like to know why you should chose us? Contact us 0203 7471865.

What a Background Search can Reveal

August 17, 2015 by pdldevv2

The Indian newspapers like to run the same stories over and over. Back in 2010 The Times of India commented on how many Indian origin families chose to use private investigator background check facilities to ensure that prospective marriage partners are all they claim to be. Now the New Indian Express is carrying the same story, with the little twist that now it’s often brides-to-be that are paying the background check fee, rather than their parents.

A large number of London private investigators conduct both discreet surveillance of husbands-to-be and undertake background checks and at Private Detective London we have a specialist team who work with high net worth individuals and their families to discreetly and comprehensively ensure that relationships are based on trust and fact. It can sit uncomfortably with some people to think about investigating a prospective partner but we know that cheats and scammers don’t limit their attentions to business activities – a growing trend of ‘rip-off marriages’ is occurring around the world.

Why might you need a private investigator background check?

Here’s our take on the situation – you wouldn’t hire a nanny or even a dog-walker without running some background checks, businesses ask for an employment history and references to ensure that they are employing good people so why would you put your happiness and wealth in the hands of somebody without doing the same? Romance is great, but facts are a much better basis for a secure, successful relationship.

As private investigator background checks grow in popularity, liars and cheats become more elaborate – we’ve discovered cases where a brother took medicals to convince a potential bride that he was healthy whereas the actual prospective bridegroom had suffered cirrhosis of the liver and also was on record as a drug addict. We’ve seen women with children from previous marriages claim to be virgins (hymen reconstructions are big business on the black market) until we produced documentary evidence proving that they had both ex-husbands and dependant children. There simply isn’t enough room here to talk about all the hidden debt, criminal backgrounds and failed businesses that we’ve found in the past histories of supposedly ‘ideal partners’.

And it’s not just India and Eastern Europe where such scams are rife. Just this month, a Bronx woman has been charged with ten marriages in 11 years, all of them without a single divorce! Liana Barrientos was caught after her most recent marriage in 2010 aroused the suspicions of a detective who investigated further to find that between 1999 and 2010 she had walked down the aisle ten times!

Real life cheating partners

It seems that she used the same social security numbers and parental details on every one of the applications, making it a simple job for any investigator whose suspicions were aroused to discover her behaviour. The most she did to conceal her crime was to change register offices from time to time. Charges so far are two rounds of ‘filing a false instrument’ which doesn’t sound so bad, until you discover that the maximum penalty is four years for each charge!

So far, nobody knows why she did this – when the newspapers got to her home, after the charges were filed, she’d fled. According to a neighbour, she’d moved into a homeless shelter.

The Indiana Jones Element

July 5, 2015 by pdldevv2

If most of our work is specialist but unexciting activities: surveillance for corporate clients who think they are being robbed, embezzled or suffering from commercial or industrial espionage, or seeking out lost relatives, cheating partners or dishonest household staff for private clients, sometimes we get to do something completely out of the ordinary – artefact hunting, for example!

Yes, donning our best Indiana Jones hats but leaving our rawhide whips at home, we’ve been exploring the murky regions of looting and pillaging. Now it might not seem like natural territory for a private detective, but Private Detective London knows that our capital city is the heartland of a rich trade in art, artefacts and archaeology – and that means that there will always be a few rotten apples in the barrel.

UNESCO has actually warned that in Iraq and Syria there is looting on ‘an industrial scale’ and we already know that the so-called Islamic State (IS) is destroying famous heritage sites and priceless works of art in territory it has overrun. What’s not so well known is that IS is financing its activities through the illegal sale of such items and that Roman, Greek, Byzantine and of course Islamic items are on open sale in London. Those buying such items are actually helping fund the fighters who are destroying such sites as Nimrod, in part to remove portable artefacts and sell them illegally.

There is little that can be done about heritage site looting, as Neil Brodie from the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at Glasgow University points out – because currently there is no international strategy to tackle the problem.

However, the looting – or simple theft – of privately owned objects can be addressed and just as in the case of the Third Reich, which plundered many Jewish art collections, private investigators like us have already begun the process of tracking down priceless family carpets, vases and ceramic items in the hope that accurate identification will mean the pieces can be returned to their owners and – with any luck – the looters, or at least the middlemen who buy from them, will be brought to justice.

It’s definitely not ‘all in a day’s work’ but with our range of international contacts and our on-the-ground knowledge, our London office is well placed to help those who have fled Syria and Iraq to keep a watching brief on specific items they have lost or know were stolen from them. We may not be Indiana Jones, but we know how to help our clients regain what is rightfully theirs!

Private Detectives, Technology and Undercover Work

April 14, 2015 by pdldevv2

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.

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

March 18, 2015 by pdldevv2

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.