While the word “Private Investigator” often conjures up mental images of a wisecracking gumshoe in a fedora and three-quarter length raincoat, in the modern era, PI’s can be downright geeky. Because so much crime and ill deeds happen online and because so much no-good is at least talked about or in some way transacted in the electronic sphere via cell phones, computers, tablets and beyond, today’s private investigators need to be electronically savvy. You too, can take a page from the private investigator’s ePlaybook – and not only learn to better spot crimes, lies and thievery, but perhaps even protect yourself from falling prey to it.
Suspect your husband or wife is cheating on you? Perform a reverse image check.
Private Investigators often start their building of a target’s profile with this step. Generally, we tend to use the same default photo of ourselves across all of our online profiles. Did you know you can actually use a reverse image tracking site like tineye.com to find all sites that have a copy of a certain image? If you think your partner is cheating, upload their default pic to that site and you might just find out that they’re looking for love in all the wrong places
Set up a Google Alert if You Think your Employee is Badmouthing Your Firm
This is another great PI tool that anyone can put to good use. Google Alerts search more than just news sites, they also troll blogs and other portals for any keyword you choose. So, if you know your employee’s common handle, enter that in as a keyword for an alert. If you suspect folks are speaking ill of you, enter your own name in another alert. Enter the company’s name for the third alert, and so on. You’ll receive daily, weekly or instant notifications from Google with links to the sites where the comments and items appear and you can nip the issue in the bud.
Go Fishing For Dirt
Let’s say you’ve figured out that your loved one is at least on the prowl at an online dating site. Why not escalate things to figure out how far they’re willing to go by setting up an online dating profile that caters to their fantasies and contact them on said dating site? PI’s do this sort of thing all of the time – and, depending on how far you want the espionage to go, you could quite literally catch your partner with his or her pants down.
