Confirming what you know and finding what you don't
News and social media searching is a big part of most of our investigations. Without the news, I wouldn’t have learned about a company’s legal issues that never made it to the courts. Without social media, I wouldn’t have seen what our due diligence subject did during a two-year gap in their work history. Without […]
As a private investigator, I search social media and online news for our clients on a daily basis, and I find it especially useful for asset investigations. Not everything will show up in public records, and news and social media research helps fill in the gaps. Here are just a few examples of what we’ve […]
Whether you’re conducting due diligence, finding hidden assets, or just digging deep into a company’s or person’s background, news searching is an important step in your intelligence-gathering process. I talk about it here a lot but realized that I’ve never really focused on the why. Why is news searching so important? Not a day goes […]
As an investigator or researcher, what you don’t find is often as important as what you do find – if not more. To be thorough, you need to be mindful of what you can and can’t deliver to your client. A recent case reminded me of this important lesson, and I’d like to share what […]
I’m frequently asked about what I use for news searching, so I thought I’d share my sources and why they’re so important to my investigations. Note that these include free and fee-based sources, because – with online information – you definitely get what you pay for. You can’t do a thorough job with just free. […]
By definition, due diligence background investigations cover a lot of territory. We dig deep into a person’s past and present to help predict the future. By examining court filings, verifying credentials, and confirming employment history, we can determine if someone’s been involved in fraudulent activities and if they are who they say they are. Any […]
Many providers of due diligence background investigations limit their media research to just negative news. Rather than gather everything they can about their subject from news and social media, they construct searches with keywords such as lawsuit, fraud, sanctions, and investigation to pull out just the bad news. If they don’t find any past instances […]
When you need focus and depth for online research, try local news. Long after the national news packs up and leaves after a hurricane, for example, the local press continues to delve into the storm’s aftermath. For due diligence background investigations this means that, as the hometown heroes (or villains), your subjects’ accomplishments and failures […]