Redditors who have hired a private investigator...what did you find out?
My mother's dad walked out on mom, my aunt, and my grandmother when mom was just 5.
A few years later, my grandmother died of a grand mal seizure.
Mom was taken in by her grandparents, but she always wondered why her dad left and what became of him.
In her 40's, she saved up a bit and hired a PI to track him down.
Turns out he moved over time from Pittsburg to California where he wound up in prison for armed robbery and so e other violent crimes.
He died in San Quentin penitentiary.
I think mom got a lot of closure out of that.
She was able to see that life would have most likely been even worse had he stayed.
At least living with her grandparents, she was loved and raised to fulfill her potential.
My grandmothers first "boyfriend" after my grandfather died said he was a retired cop and a veteran.
They enjoyed dancing to country music together, and bought a new car, in her name though, even though she can't drive anymore.
My uncles hired a PI.
Turns out, that old bastard had a habit of shacking up with widows and bleeding them dry.
(The boyfriend not the PI).
My wife and I are friends with a lot of bar owners and bar tenders because of her job.
We knew this one owner/tender, we will call him Dana, that was the nicest beep guy.
Like, if he knew you were sick, he would cover your shift at your bar and then give you the tips he made that night.
Just the best guy.
Then one night we are drinking with another bartender friend, Ben.
Ben let’s us know that Dana has brain cancer.
He’s been keeping it quiet, but Ben has been giving him money, upwards of $5,000, for treatment.
My wife and I were about to give money to Ben to pass on.
Then Dana’s business partner got suspicious and hired a PI to follow Dana on a day he took off for “medical reasons”.
Turned out Dana spent the day drinking at another bar.
No doctor visits.
The business partner confront Dana who comes clean.
He did not have cancer.
He was just saying that to get money from his friends.
Apparently lots of bartenders had been giving him money.
Dana is more or less run out of town.
He moved to a different city, and I know he slowly paid Ben back, but it took a couple years.
I’m not sure what happens to him since.
When I met my wife, she seemed to have a normal modern family.
Two moms, two dads.
Over time it became apparent her step-dad wasn’t around much.
Holidays, birthdays, you name it, he’d pop in to say hi, grab a nap, whatever, then take off again.
My wife’s family thought this was normal, just the way it had always been since they were teenagers.
He claimed to have a job following FedEx trucks around the state to prevent theft and drug trafficking.
But I thought it strange and started making jokes about him having another family.
Well, I guess it got my sister in law thinking because she gets a favor from the PI at her law firm.
Sure enough, he has not two
but THREE wives around the state, and five other (step)children between them.
My sister-in-law breaks the news to her mother who immediately changes the locks and files for divorce.
They never speak again.
Cold Turkey.
Divorce is even uncontested.
As a FU they also send the report to his other wives.
My sister (mid 30s) is adopted and hired one to find her estranged biological father.
They came back saying that not only was he still alive and nearby, but he had a daughter.
Meaning she also had a biological sibling!
Further digging from the PI uncovered that they weren't just similar ages either, they were exactly the same age.
The evidence suggested that my sister had a twin and her birth father had taken the twin and vanished.
Huge, life-changing news.
Eventually, through more incredible detective work, the PI realised that the daughter was actually just my sister.
There was no other sibling and they had just been investigating my sister the whole time accidentally.
Needless to say, we asked for the money back.
TL;DR: Sister hired a private investigator, private investigator accidentally investigated sister.
Hadn't heard from my mom since I was about 15 (very unstable due to drugs n alcohol etc) ...
When I was 29 I decided it was time to find out what happened to her.
I figured if she was a Jane Doe somewhere then I could put her to rest, and if she was alive then I wanted to let her know that I forgave her.
Hired a PI to help...
I guess she was moved by my story and so she also ran info for the man my mother was apparently married to (on the house) ... And with one clue from his report I was able to track them down.
I wouldn't have found my mom (alive and was just starting out on recovery after being homeless and addicted for many many years) if it wasn't for the PI who kindly ran an
extra report for free.
(Mom has remained sober now for about 7 years and is probably the healthiest she's ever been, physically and emotionally).
Not me but my grandfather did.
He was separated from his brother when the Japanese occupied China.
My grandfather safely made it to Hong Kong and eventually to Canada.
His brother made it to Singapore or Malaysia according to family friends back then.
So my grandfather spent a good 5 years or so working with a PI to find his brother so they can be reunited.
Sadly, with just a picture and the fact many people died in the war, it wasn’t much to go on.
My grandfather is still alive and always thinks of his brother.
It’s his wish to see him one more time.
I know somebody who was like an assistant to the actual PI.
She basically went to bingo with a camera in her purse to capture video of a woman.
The woman claimed that a car accident had completely immobilized her.
But she would take off the neck brace all the time, playing bingo hours on end.
Nothing exciting, just capturing fraud.
My law firm had a bad faith insurance case several years ago.
A guy had gotten hurt at work.
He claimed he was disabled because he hurt his back, and could not lift anything or really engage in any type of physical activity.
His disability insurance carrier failed to handle the claim and pay him what was owed.
There was a potential for relatively large damages.
In fact, the carrier filed in the court case what is known as an Offer to Confess Judgment.
It's a way of agreeing to let judgment be taken for that amount.
The plaintiff can accept the offer or reject
it.
However, if he rejects the offer he is responsible for the defendant's attorneys' fees if the verdict ends up being less than the amount of the Offer to Confess Judgment.
The Offer in this case was $ 750,000.00
He rejected the offer.
A few weeks later our PI found out that the plaintiff bowled every week.
The PI got video of the plaintiff bowling and copies of his score sheets going several years back through the date of the accident.
It was clear he really was not disabled.
He also found that plaintiff had been in a car wreck and was
making identical injury claims to the other driver's insurance carrier.
We filed a motion with the Court to dismiss the lawsuit based upon fraud and perjury.
The Court set the motion for a hearing, but before that happened the plaintiff dismissed his lawsuit.
In his twenties, my SO hired a PI to find out what had become of the childhood bully who had made his life hell, and who had vowed to kill him.
Actually, he *did* try by bringing a loaded gun to school, but some other kid ratted him out & the bully got expelled—but still lived in the neighborhood for a few more years & beat up my SO every chance he got.
The PI found the bully living in a town more than an hour outside the big city, in a dead-end job.
He’d been arrested for assault and public drunkenness a couple times.
That info helped my SO get past his fear that the guy would find
him some day & make good on his threat.
I was a private investigator for a little bit.
Most work PIs do is searching financial/court records and serving documents.
But one time I was paid by wealthy parents to stake out their college senior who had stopped returning their calls.
They were worried about her.
These parents paid like $40k for round the clock monitoring just to find out their daughter dropped out of school and was a full time ski bum.
Btw stakeouts are mostly just sitting in your car reading all day
My parents hired a private investigator to find out who my online bf was when I was 13.
The PI came back and told us he was just a fat ass 13 yo... lmfao
I used to work for an insurance defense firm years ago.
Best PI story I have is where we hired one to tail a guy who was suing our client for an injury that wasn’t entirely our client’s fault.
The guy was refusing to settle, and was insisting on going to trial even though we offered a fair sum that would’ve paid his medical bills.
The PI we hired got some good pics that showed the plaintiff was nowhere near as “injured” as he claimed, but the crown jewel of the photos was one where the guy was walking on a pier with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
Had his hand on her ass and everything.
Later in a deposition, the attorney slid the picture to the plaintiff
and said something like “Mr.
Smith (obviously not his real name), who is the woman in this picture?
We would like to schedule a deposition with her as well.” The guy went ghost white and told his attorney he wanted to settle.
At least he was smart enough to realize that if his wife found out the other woman was gonna be deposed, he was gonna have to get a family law attorney as well, because the divorce papers would soon follow.
Not a PI and haven't hired one, but I used to work in the office of a PI firm that specializes in insurance fraud.
I would edit and sometimes write surveillance and background investigation reports that we passed along to our clients (mostly lawyers and insurance companies).
One thing that never failed to surprise me: An astounding number of people who claim to suffer devastating disabilities regularly post pictures/videos of themselves running marathons and building decks in their yards.
I'm comfortable saying that in at least half of the cases I handled over two years, our clients flagged their claimants as fraudulent because of social media.
(Disgruntled exes are another significant source of tips.)
To give an example of one of the more remarkable instances in which social media saved a case: It's summer, and on the day of surveillance, our investigator sees the claimant and his family loading their car with beach stuff.
The claimant drives for a couple of hours before the investigator eventually loses sight of the vehicle (side note: tailing someone in a vehicle without 1) arousing suspicion or 2) losing the vehicle is HARD).
The investigator, being way too far from his own home to drive home, checks into a motel.
The next morning, he checks his phone and finds that the claimant "checked in" at a waterpark on
Facebook.
Investigator makes a pitstop to buy some swim trunks and a beach towel, drives to the waterpark, and gets HOURS of covert footage of the claimant swimming in a wave pool, going down waterslides, picking up and putting down his kids, and generally doing a whole lot of things you probably shouldn't be able to do with a serious spine injury.
TL;DR: If you're gonna commit insurance fraud, stay the hell off of social media.
I never hired one, but...
My husband is a private investigator and owns a PI business.
I have also helped with some surveillance.
So, very often, you do not find anything.
There isn’t anything to find.
You have clients wanting to catch their spouses cheating, but they really aren’t doing anything.
Sometimes, you realize that the client is mentally ill and very paranoid, so we can hook up cameras in the house, but no one is really “moving the furniture around” or “stealing”.
I will tell you that if my husband really believes it’s mental
illness, he will not take the job or will cease the job once this is suspected.
They need a psychiatrist— not a PI— and he’s not cool with taking money from those people.
He worked on a pretty high profile murder case.
It involved several murders over a few years.
My husband obviously knew a lot of inside stuff that never made it into the news.
He found out a lot of interesting stuff there.
He would read the Websleuths forum about the case and laugh at the armchair detectives.
Had a babysitter we thought was stealing from us, luckily our neighbor was a PI couple and they ran a background check for $10.
Babysitter had a string of DUIs and a few days before a large fine was due, my camera disappeared.
He also stole money from my kids piggy banks.
He sort of disappeared but was also really into Instagram so I surreptitiously followed him.
He started babysitting again for a single mom (easy target) and posted a lot of ‘fun’ pics with this family.
I tracked down the mom and sent her a long email detailing out his whole scam.
She said we were right and it was clear he’d been stealing from her business.
He has since gone underground but I still Google him regularly to see what he’s up to.
He’s been able to avoid arrests for a while now.
My mom's best friend.
She divorced her husband and was awarded full custody of their daughter.
His family was a beep
He kidnapped his daughter, and he and his parents just disappeared.
(This was easier in 1977 than it is now.)
She tried hiring a PI, but couldn't afford one.
So she started learning how to trace people on her own.
In the days before the Internet.
She spent years doing this whenever she wasn't waitressing.
She did find her daughter in ''81, but by this time her daughter was poisoned against her.
Mom's friend went on to get her PI license, and was a PI specializing in woman's issues for the next two decades.
I dont know what happened to her after that.
If she's alive, she would be in her '80s I think.
On the other end of the PI spectrum:
I was in a bad car accident 13 years ago.
I was rear ended at a red light by a lady going 45.
Most of my injuries were soft tissue damage minus the TMJ.
Fast forward 8 years.
Finally had my court day to see if I'd get $90k in damages.
They show camera footage from 4 years prior covering 3 whopping days of me pushing a grocery cart, carrying groceries and talking on the phone.
Apparently that's enough to determine that you're fine.
Present day: Every morning my hands go numb, it takes 3 days to clean 1 room.
I can't braid my hair.
Various other numerous
tasks that take me way longer than any other normal 41 year old.
Sometimes you have to do things because you still want to feel normal.
Not like you're a 90 year old woman.
My work requires us to hire PIs to investigate injury claims.
We had this high schooler claiming a head injury so severe that he basically couldn’t live a normal life specifically, he had an issue with bright lights.
Couldn’t stare at a computer or TV long etc.
Our PI caught him on several occasions at the movies, arcade, basketball games, etc.
so basically he was making a fraudulent claim.
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