I was speaking last week to a private investigator called Jennifer Mellon and we had a fascinating conversation about what the job entails. Jennifer and her partner Danny Boice work for the company Trustify who specialize in providing affordable and efficient private investigation services through the use of brilliant professionals. I, like may of you, have always wondered about what it is that a private investigator actually does and I was actually quite surprised when Jennifer Mellon began to detail the types of jobs which she and her team will run into on a daily basis.

Fidelity

One of the most common requests that a private investigator will get is from a suspicious partner or spouse who wants to find out if their partner is being faithful or not. More often than not this happens with couples who are going through a divorce or couples or are just about to get married. This job involves basic surveillance and then reporting back to the client.

Background Checks

Experienced private investigators like Jennifer Mellon and Danny Boice have become experts at obtaining information and many of them have contacts in key places and a detailed database where they are able to get a great deal of information about someone. Using this knowledge and the access that they have, private investigators will often need to tap into this information to carry out extensive background checks on people. This is usually for companies that are looking to hire people but it could be a check on just about anyone, for any type of reason.

Counterfeit Merchandise

In a recent case which Jennifer told me about she had to pose as a buyer and purchase some counterfeit merchandise which someone was suspected to be selling. The role was requested by a client who had intellectual property rights and she had to make the purchase and then detail the transaction and then hand over the information to the client.

Location

Very often the job will be something as simple, relatively speaking, as finding out the location of a person. This could be someone who has gone missing, a long lost friend or relative or in some cases it can be to notify someone of inheritance which has been left to them.

Attorney Assistance

In the cases of Jennifer Mellon and Danny Boice, they are often required to work alongside attorneys and help them in their cases. A private investigator will almost always work for the defense here and they could carry out any number of tasks such as finding information, locating witnesses, interviewing these witnesses and generally anything that the legal team require in order to construct a solid defense. Jennifer says that the majority of her daily job involves working with a number of attorneys to this end.

Would you like to see yourself as a private investigator one day? What is it about the job that makes you interested? Let us know in the comments below.