Social Media: A Multi-Purpose Investigation and Profit-Making Tool

“Tweeting’s for the birds,” a private investigator recently griped. “No way you’re gonna catch me on Twitter.”

If I told him Twitter, and other social networking sites, could attract new clients, aid finding people and evidence, as well as professionally brand his business, think he’d re-think his stance?

Successful PIs are good listeners. Cases have been solved just from listening to what people say about each other and themselves. When you funnel those words into digital gathering places, add indicators to locations and other information, and provide opportunities to promote and build clientele, the result is a multi-purpose investigation and profit-making social media tool for private investigators.


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Social Media Expert Offers Skip Tracing Tips for Private Investigators

Modern-day private investigators have more tools at their fingertips than ever before. Where they used to have to comb through phone books and interview neighbors, colleagues, ex-lovers, friends and family to track someone down, now they may need only log in to Facebook or Twitter.

They don’t even have to be in the same city, state or country as the person they’re tracking. A private investigator with a smart phone can theoretically run skip traces on subjects in Minnesota from a sunny beach in Hawaii.

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Social-Media Mining Opens Door to Privacy Issues

Cynthia Hetherington is a dangerous librarian.

With just a few keystrokes, Hetherington tracked down a government employee who has access to sensitive intelligence information and then — using social networking sites he frequented, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter — found his telephone number, home address and pictures of his newborn twins.

Then she mused on the hypothetical of how she might kidnap his children and exchange them for access to the critical database.

The presentation on Friday was the capstone of a three-day meeting of the International Association for Asset Recovery on Miami Beach.

While much of the conference focused on the nuts and bolts of working with financial companies and national and foreign courts to track down hidden and illicit assets, it also veered into the burgeoning field of social-network mining.

Hetherington, who was trained as a librarian and is now using those skills as a private investigator, asked a reporter not to name the man whom she raked over the digital coals during her presentation before some 300 people.

But we can say he works at a government agency that starts with a C, ends with an A and may have an I in the middle.

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