investigation information

What a Background Search can Reveal

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

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 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.