How to Hire a Private Investigator

Ok, so you need to hire a private eye to follow someone and you don’t know where to start. Here are a few suggestions on how to find the right PI to help you get the job done right.

Word of Mouth

Still the best method around. If anyone you know has used a private investigator before and had good results, reach out to them.

Attorney Referral 

Attorneys often use private investigators, especially insurance defense attorneys. So if you know an attorney, ask them for a PI they would recommend.

Ads

Ok, so you don’t know anyone who knows a good PI. Next, we go to the internet! You will have to do your own research. Once you search for “private investigator [area of interest, near me, etc.]” you’re going to see some ads, or sponsored / promoted agencies. I know a lot of us have a tendency, from the 2000’s, to skip over the ads at the top and go straight to the organic listings. Let me make a quick argument for considering the ads. One, it’s convenient. It’s right there up top. Two, that person is willing to pay for your business. Heck, they’re paying to talk to 1/4 people who click the ads to actually call, and then the 1/4 of those callers to actually have the kind of case they work and the budget to pay for it. That’s not a bad thing. So don’t skip by the private investigators who advertise out of principle. If you want to skip one on principle, choose anyone who says they’re the #1 private investigator. Somehow there are like a dozen #1 private investigators in Orlando, someday I’ll get one of them to tell me who exactly this ranking agency is and why they are so bad at counting! Who is #2?!

(TLDR: Ads aren’t bad. Just avoid agencies based out of town)

Organic Ranking

Ideally, if I am searching for an agency near me, I think I want to see 2 to 3 things pop up. In descending order: an ad, their maps location, and their organic listing. Ok, I am assuming Google here. Each page is essentially the ads at the top (PI agencies paying to advertise), the maps sections (where they are, more on that next), and the organic listings. If you see the same agency name in all 3 times, that’s a pretty good sign. It would me they can afford to advertise, they are near you or your case, and they have been around long enough to rank on Google. The organic listings is where you generally can control for longevity and location. Out of town agencies and newer companies won’t list as high, so the ones you see there should be more established, experienced, etc. New agencies often drop a lot of money at first into ads and reviews (more on that later), but they have to wait patiently to rank organically. It’s harder to shortcut that. Last note, make sure you are not looking at a landing page made specifically for that city when the company is based elsewhere, look around the site to see if you can find a business address that shows where they are actually located. Can’t find one? Move on! Found one, but they are more than 3 hours away? Move on!

One more point on marketing claims, just to make things clear. There is no officiating body qualified to rank private investigator agencies. So all claims of #1 and top-rated, etc are nonsense. Ok, so I get emails from random marketing companies that tell me my business is rated #1 and if I pay them I can post their icon. I can’t remember these companies offhand, I’m just sure it’s not JD Power & Associates. It’s like the mailers my parents got when I made honor roll in school. They could pay to have me added to some book or list thinking it would help with college admissions. But in reality, most of these claims are just a PI doing their own marketing thinking, hey, I should just say I’m the best! Truth is, I’ve been doing this for 19 years. I wouldn’t even know how to rank PI’s. I’m very plugged into the community, and really it’s just tiers. Top tier, mid-tier, bottom tier. Top tier, to us (and this is strictly limited to PI’s who do surveillance, not criminal defense or accident scene investigators) means that on a given case you successfully follow the person, don’t get discovered (or “made”), get high quality video in various difficult environments, and don’t miss anything important. Most top tier PI’s would perform generally the same or get the similar results on a tough a case. The nuances would fall to things like quality of video, use of specialized cameras, etc, but have little impact on the overall results. The top tier know each other and exclusively use each other on cases that require two investigators, or when we are booked up or on vacation and want to know that our cases are in the most capable of hands. There are very few top tier PI’s and a whole lot of the other two.

(TLDR: Seeing them rank on page one organically helps establish both that they are local and have been around for a while. Ignore marketing claims like #1 and top-rated, they are meaningless)

Maps

Why this is important. You really do want to buy local, and maps is an easy way to confirm that. I am writing this first thing in the morning. My ads don’t hit for another half-hour or so. I don’t want calls before I’ve had my coffee! But doing a cursory Google search, the top 3 ads at the moment contain a company 4 states away, a company in Miami, and one just outside of Orlando. So one PI lives in the area, the other two most likely have a subcontractor in the area. I am not going to delve into that here, but suffice it to say, I don’t want to hire a plumbing company in Kentucky who has a subcontractor in Orlando so they can say they service the entire Southeast. I would just rather find a company based in my community. But that is a preference, the real benefit is hiring a local company means the person you’re talking to knows the area and they have access to lots of PI’s in the area to assist. If you call me and say the person to be investigated will be staying at the Waldorf Astoria or Gaylord Palms, I can describe the lobby, the bar, the pool area, the parking/valet situation, and every nuance of how to work that case. Right off the bat, I can pretty much guarantee 2 of these advertising right now cannot do that, nor would I expect them to. You’ll see the agencies in the maps ranked, best I can tell in order of review count/location.

(TLDR: Maps shows you if they are local to the area of the case and allows you to read some reviews)

Reviews

After ads, in the maps section I suspect you’ll see reviews. Be careful! Make sure to look for “real” reviews that look like they were left by actual clients, with a story of their experience. PI reviews are actually pretty rare, which makes sense when you pause to think about it. We are not selling tacos here, we work cases that are often very personal and private in nature. Our most common clients have been cheated on, lied to, and some have gone through painful child custody battles. So it’s no surprise not a lot of them want to share that experience in a public forum.

Do not be distracted by the number of reviews. Actually, for me that is usually a red flag. Allow me a brief anecdote on this. A few years back I needed a set of metal mixing bowls.  I went to Amazon, and at the top of my search I saw a set for $18. The product had 1,400+  reviews with a 4.7 average, so I figured they would do the trick. Then they arrived. The lids didn’t fit and they had rust spots all over. I felt a like an idiot! I checked into it and learned all about fake reviews and bots. They knew they were selling a crappy product, and used the “review game” to push their junk on consumers. I learned my lesson. It cost me $18 and about an hour of research. The next set was $30 from a reputable brand OXO. The lids fit great, no rust, and I’m using them 5 years later! How was I duped? I didn’t actually read the reviews, I just saw there were a bunch of reviews and the rating was high. I should have just clicked the 1-star ratings to read the real reviews, had I done that, I am sure I would have moved on.

You just need to read, or even skim, the reviews with a skeptical eye. If all you see are reviews like “ABC123 Investigations is great, I use them for all my PI needs” you can pretty much mark that review as useless. It’s a friend, a bot farm, or a review swap.

Review Swap: for example, a guy with a car wash in Albuquerque want reviews, so he posts in Reddit, a Dentist in Detroit sees it, wants the same, and they leave each other a 5-star review. You do this twice a week for a year, and BOOM you now have over 100+ useless reviews of services you never provided. Google allows this, or certainly isn’t doing anything to stop it. Customers see the high number of reviews and assume this must be a popular business with hundreds of satisfied clients. It’s dishonest and meant to deceive. Full stop. NOTE: AI is actually getting pretty good at detecting this, so there is some hope. The people with what I would call an excessive amount of reviews aren’t showing up at the top of some AI requests, so maybe the AI can detect some of the BS the algorithm doesn’t.

So if you’re scrutinizing reviews, ignore the total number and read the content of the long ones. Be sure to look for the 1-star, or less than 5-star reviews, sometimes those are the only real ones. Also, check Yelp. Their screening process is better, and quite frankly, if customers are so thrilled with a PI’s services that they’ve left over 100 reviews on Google, there is 0.0% chance that none of those customers would prefer to use Yelp. In the last 8 years I would say 1/4 to 1/3 of my clients who leave reviews choose Yelp to do so, even if I request them on Google. So if someone has say 100 Google reviews, you should expect a corresponding 20-30 reviews on Yelp. Review swappers rarely bother with Yelp, since they are trying to game Google. So if you don’t see the reviews spread out over multiple review sites, just on Google, well, you know what’s up.

In case you’re wondering why someone would do this? Well, it’s free and effective advertising if you’re willing to do it. Running ads can cost $50-100 a day, so if you don’t think you should pay for business, and literally no one is recommending you, you can just review swap your way to the top and make people who only focus on reviews think you’re among the best in town, and they might even overcharge you for services because they know who is calling them. Think about it, if you only rank high in reviews, and you don’t have ad calls and your page ranks low organically, every call you get is from someone who thinks you are one of the highest/best reviewed companies in town, so you can tell them that going with the best costs more.

Sorry for the long tangent on reviews, but I am telling you–knowing how to spot inauthentic reviews may be the most important factor in not only hiring an honest and reputable private investigator, but it will help you in finding the right plumber, mechanic, and manufacturer of top notch mixing bowls too!

(TLDR: Read reviews carefully, with skepticism. Be aware of excessively high review #’s that don’t show up on other platforms like Yelp)

Read the About Us Page

This one is a personal preference of mine, because frequently I hire PI’s too. I have cases that venture out of my area that require me to find the right PI to help my client. When I go to a website I skim the front page, then I go straight to the About Us page. I don’t even look at any other portion of their website, since I already know what all their PI services will be. The about me page tells me who is this person. I want a name and a resume, CV, a picture, some sort of biographical information that tells me who this PI is and what they’ve done. If it doesn’t contain that, I backspace out of there and move onto the next PI. I understand some PI’s want to remain private, but sorry, if I can’t put a person’s name to your company, or you make me look real hard for it, I am moving on.

(TLDR: Make sure the About Us page has a good bio of the private investigator running the investigations)

Phone Conversation

Ok, now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty. Sure, most PI’s have chats on their sites (sometimes bots), but I’m old school. I need to talk to someone to feel them out. I need hear their demeanor. A couple notes here. If you have done all the above research and you think you like the PI agency you are calling first and they don’t answer, leave a message and give them maybe an hour or so to respond before moving down the list. PI’s can be on the phone with a client, in court, following someone in the field, etc. Unless your case needs to be worked that day, give your first pick a little time to call you back. You can also try sending a text or email.

Once you get them on the line, give a brief synopsis of what you need. You don’t have to lay everything out there right away. In fact, I discourage doing so, especially if you’re going to be calling around. Next, ask about how they are going to work the case? Is the PI you are talking to going to work the case themselves? Are they going to subcontract it out? Are they sending an intern? All of these are fine, but you should know. So many people think the investigator they are talking to on the phone will be the one working the case, but they shouldn’t assume it. It’s worth asking, I always do.

Discuss the cost. If it’s in your budget, and they seem good on the phone, great! Hire that PI. As long as you don’t feel the call was too pushy or you we being told what you need, you should proceed if you feel comfortable. If you don’t, move on.

(TLDR: Call the PI you are interested in hiring. Ask who will work the case. See if you feel comfortable dealing with them or feel pushed into buying)

Pay How You Want to Pay

This one is kind of important. Some of the…sketchier PI’s won’t accept payment in a form where they don’t control the refund process. If you want to pay with a credit card, they should not discourage you from doing so. If they won’t take credit cards at all, move on. The 3% credit card fee is the cost of doing business, in my opinion, it should not be forwarded onto the client. That said, I certainly offer alternatives like Zelle, Venmo, Apple Pay, CashApp, that save me that 3%, but I always make it clear the client should pay however they are most comfortable. As for refunds, you should assume that any day of work is non-refundable, unless the PI royally screws up and offers it, or you demand it. But read the invoice or contract carefully. They may not willingly offer any sort of refund and you should know that up front. If they ask you to pre-pay for say, 3 days of surveillance, and you have a target in mind (i.e. you caught my spouse with another person), it’s worth discussing up front if you will want all 3 days if they get the goods on day 1–which happens a lot! If there’s a chance you may only need one day, you need to mention that upfront, unless you end up leaving a 2-day tip, or pay them to go out and get more than you need.

I hope you found these tips useful. They really are the process I use myself when I have to hire another PI out of town. Should you need a private investigator in the Orlando or Central Florida area, please reach out to me at (407) 748-7474 or phillip@tmsinvestigations.com.