I can’t seem to wrap my head around a bizarre phenomenon in the due diligence background investigation space: lying or omitting information on a background check questionnaire. So, let me lay out a scenario for you. The Scenario A private equity firm is considering making a multimillion-dollar investment into a company. The private equity firm will do its due diligence on the company’s financials, reputation and legal issues. Before the deal is completed, one of the final pieces of due diligence is for the private equity firm to do a background investigation on some of the company’s key princi ..read more

I’ve written many times about public misconceptions of our industry, including that some folks think all private investigators do surveillance, mostly on cheating spouses. They imagine us in the bushes with binoculars, spying on people. The other thing we supposedly do all the time is find bank accounts all over the world and dutifully report this information to our clients, no questions asked. I don’t do surveillance work. I did, quite some time ago, but it’s just not my thing. For very different reasons, I never have—and never will—perform any kind of bank searches. I’ve written, spoken, and ..read more

Dozens of websites offer background checks for a few dollars. And if you haven’t had the pleasure, you can google “background check” and get ready to be bombarded. Go ahead. We’ll wait. Most of the dozens of services offered by these firms are for things like tenant screenings and run-of-the-mill pre-employment backgrounds. The firms do a few things pretty well, like verifying that a person exists, determining if they were involved in any serious crimes (in the past few years), or learning whether they are sex offenders or appear on terrorist watch lists. With the subject’s permission, you can ..read more

The George Santos fiasco provides a glimpse into the biggest background investigation failure I have ever seen. It was a failure on so many levels, but from the prospective of someone who does a lot of this kind of work, the “background investigation” conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had some huge mistakes. For those who haven’t been following closely, back in November 2022, the members of his district on Long Island, New York elected George Santos to serve in Congress. He ran as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor,” as a graduate of Baruch College ..read more

Newly elected congressman George Santos is probably the biggest public-facing background investigation failure that the world has seen, and it’s a good reminder for the private equity community about investment due diligence and background investigations. In case you don’t know the whole story, George Santos was elected to Congress from his district on Long Island back in November 2022. He ran as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” who had worked for the likes of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and owned a real estate portfolio of 13 properties. Santos purportedly received an undergrad ..read more

There are very few people on this planet that I can give more credit to in my investigative career than Mary Shannon Little.  She has been an enormous cheerleader, confidant and supporter for the last 13 years of my life. Mary gave me so many things, but the thing that she gave me the most was self-assurance. As a young business owner, she would ask me to join her investigative team on some fantastic, front-page news stories, including one we have both cited as the best case of our careers.   Even when she was out of the investigative game, Mary would refer me to some of the big ..read more

Spoiler alert: It’s our brain. Last year, we were contacted by an attorney who needed to serve some legal papers to someone who had just gone into a nursing home. The law firm had attempted to reach the person at their residence, but the wife told the process server that the man had recently gone into a nursing home, and she refused to provide a forwarding address. The attorney only had a few days to serve the man and desperately needed to get the legal papers in his hands. I told the attorney that it was going to be really difficult. Short of following the wife to the nursing home, the addres ..read more

Former employees are tempting sources of information in litigation for opposing counsel, given that they may be eager to divulge information, can offer some compelling information and occasionally can be disgruntled. Generally, former employees are fair game in litigation and can prove to be a vital source of information that proves infinitely more compelling than any document. At the very least, a former employee can help connect the dots or corroborate what you already have on paper. But there is also quite a bit of nuance involved in contacting former employees for litigation, including the ..read more

I’ve always been skeptical about commercially available “investigative” database websites like TruthFinder, Spokeo, BeenVerified and Intelius. These services get a bit of a bad rap for overselling their information, charging customers in perpetuity and providing inaccurate information. I wasn’t really sure how the accuracy of any of these services could compare to that of investigative databases like TLO, IDI, IRB, Tracers and Delvepoint, which can be accessed only by professionals. So I’ve sort of dismissed sites like TruthFinder as ineffective. Recently, however, I spoke to a private investi ..read more

Lately, we’ve done quite a few investigation interviews by telephone relating to personal injury claims, sexual abuse allegations and sourcing inquiries for board members and executive-level hires. Many people will tell you that face-to-face is the only way to conduct investigation interviews. They say you can’t establish rapport, detect deception, observe body language or control the environment over the phone. That’s true, but face-to-face interviews can also be impractical, costly or just downright unattainable (global pandemic, anyone?). I’ve been doing interviews over the telephone for ne ..read more