Surry Investigations

I've been thinking recently about the intersection of my work life and personal life. You might say that I'm a workaholic. It definitely wasn't something that happened overnight, but it's made me the private investigator I am today.

There was an instance, back when I used to work as an officer, where we received an anonymous tip alerting us to a potential predator working out of an apartment building in the slums. We were assigned in shifts to watch the building. I drew the short straw and got stuck watching the building from midnight to six AM.

After three days of watching, we were almost certain that the tip was a fake. However, we decided to continue observing the house for another 24 hours to be certain. It was on that fourth night, at three in the morning, that I spotted a man entering the house with a twelve-year-old boy.

This was reasonable suspicion, and the force quickly assembled to break into the apartment. As it turns out, the apartment was being used by pedophiles to manufacture child pornography; they had been doing this for almost three months before being shut down by the law.

It was after that case that I realized the importance of applying myself to a case at all hours, even those inconvenient or uncomfortable. As an officer, you're never really off-the-clock.

The same goes for a PI.

I love working as a private investigator and I have been doing it for nearly six years. Before that, I worked as a police officer. My experience in the force has led me to approach my investigations with a different set of expectations and experiences than many of the other people in my field. Most importantly, I try to approach each investigation with a strong sense of ethics which help to guide my actions.

Continuing in the vein of my last blog entry, I’d like to share with you a story of a time I was hired by a middle-aged couple to evaluate their daughter’s online vulnerability. Their daughter, “Suzanna,” had recently created profiles on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

Suzanna had made her Facebook profile private, making it inaccessible to non-friends. Her MySpace profile, however, was public. It listed such details as her cell phone number and her ‘top friends,’ a list of eight of her best friends.

I noted that one of Suzanna’s top friends, “Jenny,” had left a comment on Suzanna’s page saying that she would soon be changing her cell phone number upon switching to a new provider. I decided to take advantage of this information by sending a text message to Suzanna’s phone and pretending that I was Jenny.

By mimicking Jenny’s style of writing, I successfully convinced Suzanna that I was Jenny. We agreed to meet at the local mall to hang out and have ice cream that evening. I compiled the information I had gathered and presented it to Suzanna’s parents, who joined me when I went to meet Suzanna.

I, along with her parents, talked to Suzanna about the importance of protecting her personal information online. I demonstrated how easy it was for a potential predator to find her, and Suzanna promptly deleted her MySpace account.

This is just one of many situations in which I have been hired by parents to evaluate the security of their children online. More times than not, the child is easy to track down, meaning that he or she is open to potential predation.

Please, parents, remind your children that when creating profiles on social networking websites, less personal information is better.

1. Your address: This the easiest way for an online predator to find you. Never, ever put your street address in a public profile: it makes you an easy target for a predator.

2. Your home phone number: I've never understood posting your personal phone number for the world to see. Not only will you start getting phone calls from telemarketers at all hours of the day, but it is another easy way for an online predator to find your location. Most home phone numbers in North America can be reverse-traced with a simple search on a website such as Google.com. From there, your street address is just a click away.

3. Your full name: For somebody like John Smith, there's enough similar names in the world that the individual would be hard to find. For the majority of us, this is another way that predators can track you online. Used in combination with seemingly innocuous information on your profile, your name can be used in web searches to determine your school or workplace. Once you’re traced to your hometown, it’s not hard to determine your exact location.

4. Including pictures of yourself on a social networking site may seem okay at first, but they make you easy to identify in person. If a predator has traced you to your hometown, it wouldn’t be hard to find you using your picture as a guide.

5. While your daily schedule may seem to be harmless, it actually allows a predator to find you when you are alone. Including your daily schedule may not give away your location, but used in combination with other information, it can prove to be the difference between being attacked and staying safe.