It’s often depicted in film and TV of spies and spooks carrying out surveillance but what is it like for real when something has happened and it’s surveillance gone wrong?
For January I’m going to give my real world stories of some instances of when surveillance has not gone to plan and detail what happened.
I always like to explain the what and why before getting into the meat of the blog so I will explain a few of the scenario’s a private investigator carrying out surveillance can find themselves in when it’s not going the way they thought;
Having a loss in surveillance is a nightmare. A loss is whereby you lose the person you are following. Whether it be in bad traffic, a set of traffic lights, they get in a taxi and you’re on foot – a loss can occur in many ways.
Anyone that works in surveillance has had a loss and the feeling is truly awful. You need to report that back to your client which never goes well.
A hard compromise is whereby the person you are following has spotted you and is directly engaging with you. Politely or not.. normally not.
This is the worst case scenario.
This is the most common thing to go wrong on surveillance. What this means is someone unrelated to the investigation spots the surveillance ongoing and challenges the surveillance team.
If there’s a nosey neighbour then it’s when they come out and start asking about our presence in their neighbourhood.
Depending on the type of investigation, emotions are running very high for our clients. If clients are sometimes mismanaged they can act out of emotion and spill the beans to the subject of surveillance whilst we are on the job!
The first case study of surveillance gone wrong…
This was early on in my career when I was working as a sub-contractor so I did not deal with clients directly at this time. I was on a surveillance task to follow our client’s girlfriend who was going on a night out. I had done this a few times by then so the surveillance itself was running smoothly.
We had found that the girlfriend was out with friends but had conveniently met up with her ex-boyfriend along the way.. this was relayed back to the company who had employed us as sub-contracted us, who then in turn relayed that immediately to the client – the subject’s current boyfriend.
The surveillance carried on and the subject’s night was nearing the end and the group we were following headed to a kebab shop. At this point in time as I was moving for a different position a car raced past me with it’s high beams on – strange..
As I then went back towards the kebab shop the speeding car was parked, abandoned with the engine still on up on the pavement. I then looked towards the kebab shop and saw the client chasing the ex-boyfriend with a golf club in each hand. The two men disappeared back towards the town and I met with my colleague.
After we decided to call it night I drove back past the client’s car which was then surrounded by police vehicles, one of which had the girlfriend and client within..
So what went wrong.? This situation could have been avoided had the client been spared certain details throughout the night or an agreement made prior to the surveillance about how the outcome would be delivered. This is crucial and something I learned to always discuss with clients moving forward!
For this surveillance gone wrong case study it was a time that small behaviours led to a soft compromise directly with the subject.
We were working as sub-contractors again and this was an insurance task to provide evidence of the genuine state of a medical insurance claim.
With these types of task we are very limited to external assistances such as vehicle trackers so we have to do it the old fashioned way of directly following our subject.
This particular subject was a very busy bee! She claimed that she could not drive but from memory she did A LOT of driving. We followed her from early morning all the way into the early evening around town. She visited shops, a bank and a hardware store. With that, we suffered a lot of exposure.
Towards the end of the day we had tailed her for miles and her very last stop was a family members house. I still do not know what it was she saw when she exited but when she did she startled like a deer in headlights at my colleague (it made for great footage against her claim). From then on we had to play cat and mouse as she tried to locate my colleague whilst I maintained the follow for more evidence of her driving.
What went wrong on this occasion? It is not confirmed however, my belief is that it was purely the headlights on my colleagues car that did it that day. His car’s headlights were distinctive and would be on despite the engine being turned off but key still in the ignition. This small tiny detail could have been the one thing the subject noticed that day which got her noticing a similar car around her after a long surveillance period!
With it being an insurance case, it is highly likely the surveillance had been undertaken on that subject prior and we were not made aware how vigilant she would be..
Carrying out surveillance carries risks of compromise and high pressure situations.
Any surveillance veteran will have suffered a surveillance loss of their subject and almost definitely a third party compromise. Thankfully I have never had a hard compromise and I don’t plan to!
Thanks for reading! Dan
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