Hired To Investigate
I was once hired to investigate why a client's dog had gained weight. While the request seemed unusual, I decided to take on the task.
The following day, I shadowed the dog during its daily walks. I quickly noticed a pattern: the dog was being fed by nearly every stranger it met. After some research, a private investigator was able to track down an individual responsible for contributing to the dog’s extra weight.
Uncovering The Truth
To uncover the truth about my father's identity, I decided to hire a private investigator. My father, whom I’ll refer to as Henry, passed away when I was just 15, and my relationship with my mother has always been strained, making matters even more difficult. When I turned 18, I moved out, but despite asking multiple times, she refused to give me my birth certificate or any important documents.
I eventually contacted the state to obtain my birth certificate, and that's when I discovered a name listed under my father's information: "Michael." When I confronted my mother, she claimed it was a name she made up. To verify, I hired a private investigator, who confirmed that "Michael" wasn't a real person. This revelation left me with more questions about my mother's behavior, and while I’m uncertain of what’s behind it.
Being Tracked
I always chuckle when I hear about someone being tracked by a private investigator for workers' compensation. During one trial, the investigator presented a mountain of evidence showing a wheelchair-bound woman running errands. As he displayed his findings in court, the defense made a surprising move—calling in the woman's twin sister, who had been helping her after the accident.
It turns out, the investigator had been following the twin, not the woman. This mix-up made for a memorable moment in court.
Promised To Deliver
As an attorney, I sometimes need the help of a private investigator to locate individuals. In one case, both a husband and wife passed away within months of each other from natural causes, leaving behind a small mortgage. The bank was hesitant to foreclose, so my office was tasked with finding the family to see if they could settle the debt. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't locate any next of kin. Even the couple's longtime neighbors, who had known them for 20 years, were unaware of any family connections.
I enlisted a private investigator, who promised to deliver a report within a week. When he called back, he offered a discount since no report was provided. Astonishingly, the couple's existence couldn't be traced beyond the 1980s, with their mortgage application being the only evidence of their identity. The investigator shocked me by suggesting the couple might have been in witness protection. This strange case marked the beginning of a much darker story for the investigator.
After Seeing My Ad
My first job as a private investigator came from a stranger who reached out after seeing my ad. He offered me $2,000—far more than I usually charge—and asked me to look into a person’s daily routine, habits, and personal life. The conditions seemed odd, especially when he insisted that I couldn’t discuss the case with anyone or contact authorities. Despite my reservations, the money was too tempting to turn down.
After a week, I was told to stop my investigation, though I still received the payment. Days later, I saw the news and was horrified to learn that the person I had been watching had been murdered. The case haunted me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt and confusion. I still don’t know why he was targeted or who hired me. That was the last time I worked as a private investigator, and the FBI eventually got involved in the aftermath.
Early 1990’s
In the early 1990s, my brother worked as a private investigator for a law firm, and I joined him as a process server in my early 20s. He was handling a complex divorce case involving a Jordanian man and his American wife. She had been shocked to learn that her husband had multiple wives and was determined to leave, especially since she worked for NASA. My brother's task was to retrieve a briefcase with financial information from their home.
After the house was empty, we seized the briefcase and delivered it to the attorney’s office. When my brother opened it to get the combination, his face went pale—it contained technical plans for Boeing's Apache helicopter. The attorney’s reaction was immediate: “Oh my goodness!” He quickly shut the briefcase and instructed us to leave. From the looks of it, the man might have been planning a serious attack.
A Private Detective
Although I wasn’t a private detective, I worked for one at a private investigation firm. One of the most heartbreaking cases involved a young woman, around 24 or 26, who suspected her 60-year-old husband, an accountant, was having an affair with his secretary. We tracked him one evening during a "late night at the office," following him to a bar with the secretary. After drinks, they headed to her car, where we captured some very revealing footage. The client paid the $1,800 invoice after seeing the evidence, breaking down in tears.
What followed was even more difficult. Over the course of several months, she came back four times, each time with more footage of her husband with the same woman. After nearly $15,000 in fees, we sat down with her and decided we could no longer continue. It felt wrong to keep taking her money to watch her pain unfold repeatedly. Hopefully, she took a stand and moved on.
For Five Years
For five years, I worked as a private investigator, encountering various intriguing cases. One of the most notable involved a coach having an affair with a player on the team. A benched player hired me to gather evidence of the coach's secret meetings with a starting player, and I meticulously arranged to document their encounters.
It took some time to gather all the necessary evidence, but I eventually succeeded. A week later, the media reported that the coach had resigned to join the family business. Shortly after, my findings were used to break the real story. To maintain my anonymity, I had requested that my name not be mentioned in the coverage.
Claimed To Be Blind
I was hired to investigate a woman who claimed to be blind in order to collect insurance benefits. The company needed to verify her condition, so I was tasked with following her to observe her behavior.
The next day, I trailed her as she drove herself from store to store in a church van—something that contradicted her claims of blindness. In another case, I gathered evidence against a man whose actions suggested he deserved to be imprisoned for life.
First Year On The Job
My first year as a private investigator has involved some intriguing cases, one of which was particularly unsettling. A woman reached out to me after noticing strange changes in her home life, suspecting her husband might be cheating. She needed answers, so she hired me to investigate.
Upon her approval, I set up nanny cams in her home, with her directing where they should go. Since she worked on weekends, it was the best option to monitor the situation. After three days of footage, I discovered something far more alarming than infidelity. The husband was secretly engaging in inappropriate behavior with his stepdaughter. Shocked, I immediately reported the evidence to the local courthouse and urged the authorities to intervene.
Things Are Not What They Seem
My father’s not an investigator, but he’s a lawyer and he used to have to look into people who were suing the insurance companies he worked for. One woman claimed she was in a really bad car wreck and was suffering intense leg pain, back pain, neck pain, etc. This was back when MySpace was going strong. So my father Googled her and found her on MySpace.
It was filled with recent photos of her clubbing, dancing, and even horseback riding. Needless to say, she didn’t win her case. Now my dad, being a very sheltered individual, did not understand some of the terms he came across on her page—which led to a hilarious moment in court. He had to approach her and he asked: “I just have one question. What exactly does it mean to ‘get crunk?'”
Suspicious Nightlife
I once did surveillance on a nurse. She was supposedly so disabled that she couldn’t work. They suspected she was secretly working, though. It was the easiest surveillance I ever did. I arrived. She got in her car ten minutes later. I followed her, with no complication, to a strip club where she went in and began doing her thing. The club had a posted prohibition on taking videos. So I had to go in and watch her dance so that I could testify that I saw her dancing when it went to court. Over the next few days, I followed her to three other strip clubs and did the same. That month, I turned in the sketchiest expense report of my entire life and career.
Eventually, it went before a judge. When the judge asked why she was stripping, she just shrugged and said that she made twice as much money as when she was nursing. Her benefits instantly got yanked. The insurance company was happy. But the company lawyer gave me the nickname “Detective Breasts” which, most regrettably, stuck and spread to all of the other lawyers I dealt with. Worst night of my life, man.
I worked for one of the top private investigator firms in Houston. Because of my electronics background, I’d usually go along on the jobs where we were checking for bugs and hidden surveillance devices. We once got a call from a client who was sure that his office was bugged because his client knew everything that he was doing before he did it.
His office was a mobile trailer that was on his client’s site. He was a subcontractor for a big oilfield construction company. We did a full electronic sweep and found nothing. No devices were implanted in his phones. We’re getting ready to leave and he says: “Look, I’m not crazy. Pick up the phone, press 9 and you’ll start hearing all sorts of clicking sounds.” Turns out his office phones were routed through the corporate PBX of his client. So they didn’t have to bug his office, they could just “pick up an extension” inside the main building and listen in to whatever they wanted. We advised him to install a private phone line. We ended up billing him like two grand for that visit.
Not For The Faint Of Heart
A college friend of mine was a private investigator. He said that the majority of his casework isn’t tailing people, but serving court notices. He told me of a variety of really slimy ways he’d served people, including wearing disguises, using high-pressure tactics, and experimenting with weird social engineering tricks.
He’s out of the field now because he’d had too many close calls. Serving divorce papers or notices of being sued where you have no idea what the state of mind of the person you’re serving is like could easily get interesting, to say the least. Let’s just say it’s a field that only people with a high tolerance for danger and excitement should go into.
Not Suitable For The Job
When I was an investigator, I was asked to train my replacement. She was in the process of firing all the old blood to pack the office with her friends. It was incredibly obvious that I was next on the hit list, and she wanted me to train a 19-year-old idiot and she was expected to do a very important job. But I tried. I could not force her to pay attention to me, so I just explained everything while she played on her phone sitting next to me in my cube.
Didn’t work out well for them. The boss actually chewed me out for not training her when everyone in the small office knew I went over the quirks of the McDonald’s contract with her for nearly half a day. The salespeople had promised them the world to land the contract, and they had an extremely complicated system for adding new franchisees that were all on a spreadsheet that only I knew how to maintain. Not long after I was let go, we were no longer the official background check company for McDonald’s. That amounted to the firm almost immediately losing about half of its corporate clients.
Candid Camera
My uncle is a private investigator. He got tasked with investigating a collision at an intersection. He found a nearby business that happened to have a camera facing the road at the time and figured that it would have picked up some of the incidents. He collected the footage and got said footage of the collision. And he discovered that his client was definitely in the wrong and caused the accident.
But the video got so much worse. You then see the client attacking the other driver while damaging his own car further. It was meant to be an insurance scam where the client could say they hired a PI but found nothing. The intention was for that to legitimize his story. However, he didn’t count on a camera picking the whole thing up, and so he ended up incriminating himself. My uncle still got paid for the job.
Breaking And Entering
I’m a private investigator. One time, I was hired by this really famous author to test the security system at his Hawaii vacation home using my professional expertise.
So basically, I had to try and break into his house and see if I could succeed—but there was an unexpected twist. Unfortunately, his British caretaker didn’t realize that this was going on and set his two dogs on me thinking I was a real crook. I had to escape by hot wiring his Ferrari.
Eavesdropping
Not a private investigator myself, but I once overheard an unbelievable conversation with one. I was at my friend’s house and he got a knock on the door. The dude said: “Hello, sir, are you X?” My friend replied: “Yeah, why?” The guy then proceeded to explain that he was a private investigator and that he’d like to talk somewhere in private. My friend said: “Nah, I’m fine just talking here at the door.” The man then showed my friend a picture and said: “Do you know this man? His name is Y.” My friend replied: “Yeah, that’s my great-uncle.
He’s vacationing in the Congo right now, why?” The detective replied: “I’m sorry sir, but your great-uncle just passed on from hepatitis.” The man then elaborated on how his great-uncle, a priest, had slept with some lady of the night while on vacation, and got infected and passed on. Apparently, someone had hired this investigator to track down the poor guy’s relatives and inform them of what had happened. I was in the living room eating pizza the whole time, pretending to be watching TV.
Stalker Alert
My significant other had a stalker who would send him flowers. We would come out to our front garden to find notes or gifts—it was a secured area—and once got a glassine envelope left at the front door with strange white powder in it. Nothing happened to us, so it probably wasn’t harmful, but still really weird and frightening.
Then, crazy letters started getting sent to neighbors about how awful I was, that I was a thief or even worse. This went on for a couple of months, so we hired a guy who came highly recommended by our attorney. BOOM. Caught ’em. It turned out to be a married woman who had a bad crush on my husband. We didn’t press charges, but we had the attorney scare the living heck out of her. That was the end of it. I’m sure this wasn’t the most difficult case he ever had, but he was so quick with the result—it was mind-blowing that our life was put back right so quickly.
Monitoring The Neighbor
I accidentally became the owner of a detective agency. I intended to just be an investment partner, but the owner and actual P.I. passed on shortly after I made my investment and I now owned a detective agency. After quickly getting the various licenses, etc., I just started taking cases. The entirety of what I knew about how to be a P.I. was from various TV shows. I would just rely on random people whose life has become so bad that they decide calling a P.I. is the next logical step. I learned that normal P.I.s never take these so-called “domestic” cases because they are always a huge mess.
The guy calls me to help catch his neighbor who is knocking over his trash cans at night. We set up a small night vision camera to catch the guy. Watch the video the next day—it’s the wind. The client freaks out and says that his neighbor could have had an invisibility field or could have been moving too fast—like the Flash—to show up on camera. It turns out lots of people call P.I.s to investigate the TV controlling them, alien abduction, etc.
The Watcher
My ex-husband went off the deep end when I left him three years ago, despite the fact that he was cheating on ME every step of the way. Anyway, I moved 1,000 miles away and began to restart my life. One day, about a month after leaving him, I checked my mail and saw that I had a huge, heavy envelope in the box. When I opened it, I was horrified.
It was photos of me doing all the activities of my daily life, but the photos were clearly taken from afar, and without my knowledge. Immediately, I contacted my attorney. It turns out, my ex was hoping to catch me with someone else because he wanted to try to sue me for abandonment. It was awful, and it took me a long time to feel safe and secure in my new home.
All In A Day’s Work
We had to follow this cheating husband to the beach in Florida. I got paid to go hang out in a nice beach town. Didn’t get a lot of sleep, though, thanks to having to be up gathering video evidence after they went to bed, but it by far beats the normal jobs. What’s crazy is, the daughter was able to catfish her father and get more evidence. He also had a stupidly easy password on Match.com, so we could see everything he was saying and planning.
Of course, what’s sad is people cheating, and they have to know their partner knows they’re cheating, but they keep doing it even though their partner asks for a divorce and they refuse. Usually, the cheater is better off financially if they’d go ahead and leave. No one is happy but they just keep going. What was infuriating was just straight-up busting someone with perfect evidence of infidelity, and then the client goes and takes them back and ruins all of our work. The law is infidelity evidence only counts if the offended party does not take them back or sleeps with them, so it’s annoyingly fragile in these dramatic relationships.
The Things You See
My wife was a P.I. Not a lot of research, mostly documenting insurance scams. In the last case she ever worked, she was staking out a house, trying to get a man who was claiming not to be able to work because of his car accident, doing stuff he says he can’t do. He opens his front door, and she starts videotaping, hoping he’ll start doing yard work or something.
Instead, he pulls out his you-know-what and starts going to town on himself on his front step for a few minutes before walking back inside. The tape became legendary comedy material in the office she was working at.
A TV Special
My family member is a P.I. He was working on a case a few years back. Hired to catch a spouse cheating. Well, this initially typical case ended up kind of turning into a case dealing with a hitman being hired against the client by the client’s cheating spouse. Kind of funny, but I didn’t realize it was made into a kind of TV special until we were watching the show over a year later and I noticed that the story seemed a bit familiar.
Then it showed some clips of the cheating spouse’s home and I recognized it. I sometimes traveled with my relative to help with the case. The TV special was a bit vague on how they were able to connect the hitman to the cheating spouse in court, but really it was due to evidence that the P.I.—my family member—collected and turned over. They wanted to include that, but the P.I. relative did not want to be on TV.
A Sad End
I once handled the case of a kid that was so gruesome, it’s impossible to forget. He’d accidentally fallen into a raw sewage tank and two employees dove in to try and save him.
Sadly, not only did the kid have to spend his last few moments on Earth drowning in a pile of human waste, but both employees who wanted to help developed serious health problems from the exposure to the raw sewage. One of them ended up taking his own life, and the other had chronic health problems from it.
Too Close For Comfort
I’m not a private investigator, but I know someone who was a junior detective. This one case he had was an absolute mind-bender. So this guy had been cheating on his wife (the client), with her brother. Except—she claimed she didn’t have a brother at all and grew up as an only child. So naturally, they were really curious to find out who this “brother” of hers was.
When they questioned the husband, he said that the guy who claimed to be his wife’s “brother” said that “We’ve known each other for so long” and “I grew up with her” and all that jazz. At first, my friend assumed it was probably a long-lost brother or something, but then when the husband was asked to describe the guy—get this. He described the wife’s father. According to the wife, her father wasn’t there during her wedding and was replaced by her uncle instead. The husband hadn’t met him before. He was cheating on his wife with her father! Absolutely wild.
The Family Tree Of Lies
My family has hired P.I.s on three separate occasions. All three of them found massive amounts of infidelity, with two of the three uncovering secret families. Great-grandpa died and turns out to have had three wives simultaneously. My grandpa hired the P.I. to figure out the details and clear up the messy inheritance it caused. Oddly enough, grandpa was on great terms with his newfound half-siblings for the rest of his life. Then, my uncle traveled a bunch to Mexico for work, so my suspicious aunt hired a P.I. to trail him.
Turns out, he had an illegitimate family in Mexico. It caused a huge inheritance pain in the butt AGAIN when my uncle eventually died of natural causes. But that wasn’t even the end of it for my crazy family. My cousin was married to a professional baseball player on the East coast. My folks suspected he was a cheater and hired a P.I. to trail him, which turned out to be a rampant cheater for sure, divorce followed shortly. To this day, he’s considered an unperson in my family, and no one will tell me what his name was or what team he played for.
Background Check
Doing a standard pre-employment background check on a guy, I learned that he had been found guilty in a harassment case. I didn’t have all the case details at that point, and the applicant denied that it was him. I pulled more details from the case and confirmed that it was definitely him. And that he was convicted of indecent exposure.
The guy finally admitted that it was him, but claimed that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He pulled out the court transcripts from the trials. Turns out he flashed a 12-year-old girl on the beach and said, “Ever seen one of these before?” Suffice it to say that when I reported my findings back to my client, this fellow did not get the job…
Mr. Nice Guy
As a college student, I worked for a private investigation firm and shadowed a wealthy retiree for days on end. His kids were “concerned” that he might remarry and cut them out of the will, so they hired us to report on his activities. He was having a heck of a good time. Golf, dancing, drinking, and hanging out with many widows, too.
I needed to approach him at one point and pretend to be conducting a “survey.” He didn’t know that I’d been following him for days on end. He cooperated nicely, answering all my silly questions. He had no clue that I already knew everything about him. But once I talked to him directly, I really started to like the guy and wanted to tell him the truth. But I didn’t do it. I turned in the report. I have always felt both guilty and creepy about being so duplicitous toward this guy.
Stinky Disposal
One of my clients called into the office wanting to find the culprit behind, get this, “indiscriminate fecal matter disposal” on her porch.
So I did the usual routine. I scouted out the neighborhood and asked people questions about seeing anything at night or any other suspicious activity. A lot of people laughed in my face.