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I have a friend who is a private investigator. He mostly films people committing insurance fraud. His stories are amazing. My favorite was a guy who was supp
by swalsh 9y ago
I have a friend who is a private investigator. He mostly films people committing insurance fraud. His stories are amazing. My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk, but my friend had stalked the guys facebook, and saw that he was planning on attending this festival with thousands of people. Probably lots of walking. The trick was finding the guy. So he went to the parking lot and quickly tracked down the guy's car (before he was a PI, he repossessed cars, he's a pro at finding cars). After that, he went to the info desk and told them the guys car's lights were on. They made a quick announcement, and he went back to the parking lot to watch. Dutifully his target came back, looked, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back. My friend spent the rest of the night filming the guy walking, jumping, having a good time.
He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\
- mlrtime 9y agoInteresting story and his method is effective. However it is not efficient, he can only track one guy a day, possibly a week.
- swalsh 9y agoWhen he catches a guy he saves the company tens of thousands of dollars. He only needs to catch one guy a week for it to be economically feasible to use his time. By the time they give him the case, there had already been a number of red flags.
- isostatic 9y agoHowever automation will allow everyone claiming this sort of beenfit on insurance to be automatically followed, evidence automatically gathered, and perhaps a minimum wage flunky in India to give it a once over before the automated summons is sent. The cheat will be caught far sooner, and the PI will be out of a job. Of course those who aren't cheating will also be caught, as the cameras identify people who look very similar, and the courts listen to how the camera has a 1 in a million chance of being wrong (therefore will identify 350 people in the US as being the same person). It's DNA evidence problems all over again.
- wiz21c 9y agoHis methods are efficient under the constraint of "not resorting to mass surveillance". I'd feel better if that constraint continued to exist.
- pythonaut_16 9y agoI think that's the point they're trying to make. It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation. What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.
- rco8786 9y ago> He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\ > He tells me he’s most familiar with the low tech ways FTFY. Interesting story though, always neat to see how people like that operate.
- verelo 9y agoFTFY? I feel like this is the first time I’ve seen that one. Googled it, “fixed that for you”. Interesting.
- optimuspaul 9y agointeresting but annoying. they saved themselves some characters but cost you the time to google it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- techiferous 9y agoIt's common on Reddit.
- optimuspaul 9y ago
- glaberficken 9y ago> "He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\ " But they don't scale up with numbers or across geographically. The scary thing about automated processes of facial recognition is precisely the ability to scale to everyone and everywhere.
- lovetrump 9y agoThis and other automated tracking/recording/etc methods will basically make privacy a thing of the past. It should be illegal, because without privacy, there can't be democracy (see the Facebook scandals as an example).
- fiter 9y agoIsn't privacy/anonymity in a crowd just a thing of the present? In a small village, everyone knew who you were and knew your past.
- jerf 9y agoEven assuming everybody in that village knows everybody else to the degree that Facebook knows you, it is at least mutual; ol' Grandma Francine knows I'm foolin' around but I know what Grandma Francine got up to when she was my age and who her daughter's real dad is, too. What private things do you know about the people serving ads to you? Nothing. Yesterday I saw someone on HN discussing their download of info from Facebook, which is supposed to include what advertisers know what, and they found they couldn't even find the advertiser's company name in Google. And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.
- barronli 9y ago
- Cvbncvbn 9y agoYour friend sounds like a jerk
- bsenftner 9y agoWhy do you say that? He's a professional investigator, and the story is about catching someone committing fraud. How is that being a jerk?
- andrepd 9y agoPIs definitely go into a lot of grey areas, and believe not every job they take is so straightforwardly legal as catching insurance fraud...
- bsenftner 9y agoTheir bread and butter is affairs and investigation of the claims of a lawsuit.
- Cvbncvbn 9y agoYou also said he used to be a repo man. Does he have a mustache, tophat and cane?
- fjsolwmv 9y agoHe harasses people get doesn't know are guilty.
- 3pt14159 9y agoI've been getting into OSINT since I started talking with the arms control community (over my concerns about mass cyber attack and autonomous vehicles) and you'd be floored at how shitty the tools they use are. If you're even a halfway decent data scientist or cyber security professional you'd be 10x more effective at actually munging through data and finding people. Even simple things like munging through millions of records with regexes are hard for them. It's not surprising to me that they think low tech ways are the most effective. The tools they use are really horrible and pale in comparison to basic shell scripting, let alone scipy.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoThere's a really interesting Defcon talk about the subject: https://youtu.be/uBy2N0NmS2o https://youtu.be/uBy2N0NmS2o
- 39d3493I93 9y agoBut that does not scale for elite globalist AI and robotics based total domination control of society. When you have human investigators you have a human weak link that could turn on you. Robots and AI don't ask questions .... ever.
- pakitan 9y ago> My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk Isn't this something that the insurance company would be able to confirm by forcing the person to undergo a medical exam? Seems hard to imagine that such a disability can be faked well enough to fool a doctor.
- dylanz 9y agoI know someone who works at CarpeData, and the agents just search through Facebook/Twitter/etc all day. A lot of low hanging fruit!