February 15, 2022 | Eul Basa

Shocking Discoveries By Private Eyes


Private eyes can help you find the answers you seek—as long as you're prepared to face the cold, hard truth. The following stories prove that some things just aren't meant to be discovered. From dark family secrets to mindblowing missing person's cases, here are some of the most shocking discoveries made by real private eyes:


1. Where'd Daddy Go

My mom was just five when her dad walked out on her, her sister, and their mother. A few years later, they lost my grandmother after she had a seizure. My mom went to live with her grandparents but always wondered why her dad left and what happened to him. So, in her 40s, she'd saved up enough to hire a PI to find him.

The PI found out that her father had moved from Pittsburgh to California and ended his life in prison. He had committed various offenses after he'd left his family. My mom got closure from knowing that. She realized him leaving had actually been better for her. Without her father, she grew up being loved and cared for.

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2. Weird Revenge

This couple was divorcing, but the wife was suspicious of her husband for a bizarre reason. She was sure that her husband was sticking random items of hers up his butt. So she hired me to spy on him. Turns out she was right. He was doing exactly that. I am still scarred to this day by the photos I took of him in action.

This is a golden example of the kind of thing that only a private investigator would ever get to experience!

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3. Maternal Determination

I hadn't heard from my mom since I was a teenager due to her instability and issues with substance misuse. I decided when I was 29 that it was time to find out what had happened to her. I thought that if she was a Jane Doe somewhere I could put her to rest. But if she wasn't, I wanted her to know that I forgave her. So, I hired a PI to help.

Apparently, my story moved her, so she also looked up the man who my mother married. With one clue from his report, I was able to track them down. When I found her, I burst into tears. My mom was alive and just starting her recovery from addiction. She had been homeless for years because of it and hadn't had many options to help her get better.

If my PI hadn't run that one report for me for free, I wouldn't have been able to find her. My mom is now seven years sober and probably at her healthiest both physically and emotionally.

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4. Checking Out

The strangest case that my firm ever handled was towards the end of last year. The job was given to us by another agency. It was for that same evening. That is an important detail, as it meant we did not have time to screen the job and get all the details that we would normally ask for. The client suspected that her husband was having an affair with a coworker.

He worked at a hotel in a capacity that I don't quite recall. We sent two agents to monitor him at work, requiring several hours of effort, all the while putting more on the expenses tab as the team had to keep buying drinks to avoid raising suspicions. The client would phone for updates every few minutes, despite being told not to make contact and that a full report would be issued in short order.

The agents managed to tail the individual until the end of his shift, seeing nothing unusual. They then discreetly followed him home, deciding to give the client a call and confirm that the address he had come to was his house and not that of the coworker that he was allegedly cheating with. The client evaded the question and demanded that the team go back to the hotel.

Confused and irritated, the agents went back and were greeted by the sight of the client, scrambling out of a bush, binoculars in hand, directly opposite the hotel where, judging from the state of her clothes, she had seemingly been for most of the evening. Furious, the agents questioned her. That’s when they found out the bizarre truth. She finally confessed that the man they had been watching wasn't her husband, but rather someone she had been involved with casually who was no longer returning her calls.

Stern words were had. Management even talked about bringing in the authorities against her. Our firm blacklisted her. She did, however, pay promptly and in full when we sent her the bill. There were many more stories of note from my time in that job. Some funny, and some strange. But that one was definitely the weirdest!

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5. Bigger Than You

In his 20s, my significant other hired a PI to find out what had become of the childhood tormentor who had terrorized him then even vowed to end his life. He actually did try to carry out this threat by bringing a loaded gun to school. But fortunately, some other kids ratted him out, and the school expelled him.

But he still lived in the same neighborhood for a few more years and beat up my significant other every chance he could get. The PI found him living an hour from the city working an average job. He had a record for public intoxication and got into fights regularly. This helped my significant other to get over his fear.

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6. Blinded By The Light

I was hired to follow a woman who claimed that she was completely blind. She was collecting insurance money to compensate for this disability, so of course, the company wanted someone to find out if she was telling the truth. I spent the next day following her around as she drove herself around from store to store in a church van.

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7. Taking Candy From A Baby

I suspected my babysitter of taking money and valuables. Luckily, a couple who were private investigators lived close by. They ran a background check for ten dollars; My babysitter had several driving tickets. A few days before one of his fines was due, my camera had disappeared. He even took money from my kids' piggy banks!

I eventually lost contact with him, but he was really into Instagram. So, I followed him. He had started babysitting again and posted lots of fun pictures with the family. But this time for a single mom who seemed like an easy target. I found the mom's contact information and sent a long, detailed email about his scam.

After getting my email, she looked into it and realized that he had been siphoning money from her business. He has since deleted his social media, but I still look him up online from time to time. He hasn't been caught with anything for a while now.

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8. Something Much Worse

I’ve been a private investigator for going on a year now, and the strangest case I had was of a woman asking us to find out if her husband was cheating on her. She said there was something off in the house, as if she was feeling something different than usual in her relationship and she wanted to know what it was. She strongly suspected her husband of cheating.

So I show up and install nanny cams in her house for the weekend, upon her approval. She shows me where to place them. She works all weekend and this was the best route. Well, three days go by and I collect the footage. I review it and find out that the husband was secretly "touching" his stepdaughter. After seeing that, I immediately rushed to the local courthouse with a copy of the footage and got a court order for the authorities to go and get him.

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9. Bros Being Bros

My friend was hired to keep an eye on a woman's husband who she thought was cheating on her. The husband had a trip planned to the Caribbean with a bunch of his friends, and his wife authorized the PI to follow them there. Rather than nonchalantly observing, the PI befriended the group and partied with them. The husband wasn't cheating. He just liked his friends.

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10. Photo Finish

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 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?'"

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11. Use What You Got

For our wedding, I wanted to invite my husband's friends. Except my husband didn't keep in touch with any of his college roommates and he wasn’t on social media. All he knew were their names. So, I looked on social media and found three out of the four. The other roommates had not kept in contact with the last one either.

My husband knew his name, which was common, and the closest city where he thought he lived. I paid $25 to get a background check on him and got his mom's name. I found her on social media and went through her friends list. I found this one woman who shared the same last name as the last roommate. I wrote her a message.

I asked her if she was related to the roommate who I was looking for. She responded and told me she was his sister! She gave me his address, and he came to the wedding.

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12. Who Knew These Stories Could Be Touching?

I'm a private investigator. One matter which really made an impression on me was where a person had been in a fatal vehicle accident. A claim was made that it was a workplace injury. I don't know what on earth happened with this claim, but it was five years before the insurer gave it to me. There were some questions about it.

The person making the claim alleged to be the wife of the worker who’s died in the accident, though his former work colleagues did not know her. Also, the accident took place almost 200 kilometers away from the workplace. When I spoke to former colleagues of his, a lot of them struggled to remember him. This really was so sad.

It left a deep impression on me about what we are once we are dead, if we are not even memories. I did, however, learn that he stayed at a trailer park during the working week. I called that place, but the owner said it had changed hands. He also didn't know the guy, he didn't have any old records, and he didn't know where the former owner was.

He did remember the former owner's name, however. I called everyone in the phone book for the state with that name. I finally got my man, and he remembered the deceased vividly, along with his wife and son. It was tremendous! I learned that the guy would stay near the workplace during the week and then travel back home, to a remote town, for weekends.

I drove all the way to that town, but couldn't find the wife. She wasn't at any address I had, nor did she answer her phone. I got petrol and asked at the counter if they knew the family. They said it might be so-and-so, and directed me to a house. I went there, and it turned out to be the wife's parents. They called the daughter.

She arrived and both mother and daughter had a big cry while showing me all their photographs of the guy. It was very moving, and I was so relieved to have real evidence that the guy ever actually existed after how his co-workers were all finding it hard to remember him. The story broke my heart. He lost his life on the way to work on a Monday morning.

Normally, he would travel to the caravan on a Friday night, but this particular weekend was Mother's Day. He stayed late Sunday night and traveled back Monday, early in the morning. Tragically, he ran his car off the road and he died. I was able to determine that the lady was genuinely his wife, that he was indeed on his way to the workplace at the time of the accident, that it was his regular route to work, and so on.

I supplied all of this information to the insurer. I rarely ever get to hear what actually happens to a matter in the end, so I can only hope that it was finally settled.

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13. Going Swimmingly

I used to work for a PI firm that specializes in insurance cases. My job was to handle the surveillance and background reports for our clients. The number of people who claim to be suffering but also regularly posted photos and videos of themselves doing things like running marathons or building decks always amazed me.

Over half of the cases that I'd handled over two years were flagged because of social media posts. There was a case where the investigator watched the claimant loading his car for a beach day with his family. He followed the car but eventually lost it. Being too far to drive back, the investigator checked into a motel.

The next morning, he checked his phone and saw on Facebook that the claimant "checked in" at a water park. So, he made a pit stop to grab some swim trunks and a towel, drove to the waterpark, and recorded hours and hours of covert footage of the guy doing a lot that would be impossible to do with a serious spine injury.

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14. Room Service

I’m not a private investigator myself, but I am someone who was confronted by one…and told that it was the weirdest thing he's ever had to do. A roommate I had in college was a strange guy. This guy came from the other side of the country. He went out at all hours of the night, never showed up for class, slept during the day, and drank more energy drinks than is healthy.

His parents were worried about him, apparently, and hired a private investigator to trail him. Now, living in a college dorm in a part of campus where only freshmen live makes an adult who isn't janitorial staff stick out like a sore thumb. So, I picked up fairly quickly on the fact that this guy was hanging around the dorms. I thought he was just trying to pick up some freshmen, and didn't bother him.

A few weeks later, I was walking back from the dining hall, and the guy approached me asking if we could talk somewhere in private. I was weirded out and told him we could talk right here. He told me that he was a private investigator hired by my roommate’s parents to trail him because his parents were concerned, and he wanted to ask me about my roommate's dorm habits.

We then left for the coffee shop to talk about my roommate. My roommate apparently liked to go walk on the beach at night for stupid amounts of time. He also liked to hang out at Steak and Shake, play games on his phone and Nintendo DS for hours on end, and cruise thrift shops for some reason. I told the guy that the dude just slept and didn't even have any personal belongings in the room beside his clothes.

The detective and I both realized that this kid pretty much had no direction or motivation in life, and that his parents usually pushed him to do everything. He said that this kid's behavior was the most bizarre pattern of activity he's pretty much ever seen. To explain the kid's actions, college was the first alone time he's ever had, and he was savoring it to do whatever he wanted.

I ended up feeling for the guy and reached out to him. He changed majors from engineering to a psychology degree because he wanted to learn about how the mind worked. As soon as that happened, he suddenly became super interested in college. He ended up being a pretty cool guy once he realized that he was not in his parents’ grasp anymore.

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15. Absent Father

My good friend was raised only by her mom growing up. She always told her that her father had walked out on them when she was a baby and that he had never wanted anything to do with her. My friend took it really hard and struggled through her whole childhood believing that. She hired a private investigator to find him.

Well, they did, and it turned out what her mother told her was a lie. Her dad is actually one of the sweetest and soft-hearted guys I've ever met. He left because my friend's mom forced him out when he uncovered her infidelity. He probably wasn't actually her dad because her mom cheated on him while they were together.

It didn't matter though. He loved her as his own and had avoided contact because her mom convinced him that he had no parental rights. Even worse, she threatened to accuse him of terrible things when my friend was a baby if he did try to reach out. Thankfully, my friend is an adult and had moved out of her mom's house.

Now, she can have the relationship with her dad that she had always wanted. It just sucks that she had to wait years and go through all of the trouble of hiring an investigator to get it.

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16. His Name On The Streets

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 video. 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 because 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.

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17. Teach You A Lesson

My younger brother is dyslexic and has severe social anxiety. He was struggling a lot in a public school setting. The teachers and principal insisted they were following his education plan, but every day, my brother would come home shaking in tears feeling abandoned and dumb. So, my mom decided to hire an investigator. What they found was chilling.

Sure enough, the teachers were just ignoring my brother. They sat him in the back and told him to do his work. Then they wouldn't go through it with him. They yelled at him again when he could not do it because of his dyslexia…that they knew about! With all the evidence, my mom arranged a meeting with the school board.

She threatened to sue them. So, they agreed to pay his tuition for a private school that was supposed to help. It didn't, and mom ended up just pulling him out and homeschooling him. He's been doing a lot better.

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18. Something’s Bugging Him

All right, here goes. After I got out of the Navy, 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. This was back in the early 1990s, so we didn't have to worry about burst transmissions or anything like that. No devices implanted in his phones. He insisted on a full physical sweep of the trailer, inside and out.

So we crawled under the trailer, then got a ladder and inspected the roof. Still nothing. We're getting ready to leave and he says: "Look, I'm not crazy. Pick up the phone, press 9 to get an outside line, and you'll start hearing all sorts or 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 weren't even sure if this was legally permissible or not. We advised him to install a private phone line that he paid for if he wanted private conversations. We ended up billing him like two grand for that visit.

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19. A Turn Of Events

My friend hired a PI after suspecting his stepdad of being unfaithful to his mom. My friend is 6'2” tall and 235 pounds; his stepdad is 5'10” tall and about 160. My friend gave the typical "if you hurt her, you'll regret it" speech at 15 when his stepdad and mom started their relationship. The PI found out that he wasn't cheating—but instead, he found something else.

There was a house on the market that my friend's mom wanted. He bought it and had been remodeling it for some time in secret. As a fifth anniversary gift, he surprised her with the newly finished five-bedroom house.

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20. The Boring Stuff

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.

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21. Back To Their Roots

My boyfriend's family hired a PI to do some covert genealogy because they're white but have thick wiry hair that only black hairdressers can handle. It was also because there are things older folks in these parts just don't talk about. They discovered they were descendants of the Lumbee Indians who were a group of disenfranchised Native Americans and escaped friends.

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22. Instant Karma

When I was an investigator, I was asked by my supervisor 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. Seriously, this girl had honestly only found out that Santa wasn't real the year before, and now 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. Did not 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.

And that's about it. Being a private investigator was just a mildly interesting aspect of what was otherwise a typical office job with typical office drama.

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23. Cleaning House

I came home from work one day, and my fiancé asked me for my engagement ring to have it professionally cleaned. The second I gave it to him, he accused me of cheating on him. The conversation went back and forth for a long time. I was beside myself; I couldn't believe what he was saying and he wouldn't change his mind.

He then told me he'd had a PI follow me for six weeks who had seen me get into a red car. It was someone who drove me to work, but he would not believe me. I knew then it was over and packed my things and left. I told him to get in touch with the PI and have another look at the so-called "evidence" that I was cheating.

An hour later, he turned up where I was staying begging to have me back. He'd realized his mistake. There was no way I was going to get back with someone who would behave that way so we parted ways.

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24. Crash Landing

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 some of the incident up. 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.

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25. Know Your Mark

I worked at an insurance company that dealt with injury claims. More often than not, the investigator would find nothing or give us video showing that the claimant was indeed injured. Some people exaggerate their injuries, but they're in the minority. It sadly places unfair suspicion on the legitimately injured people.

In one case, the insurer collected hours of video of them following a young, physically fit guy while he worked outside on a home renovation that involved a lot of heavy lifting and carrying things up and down ladders. All that despite a reported back injury. The insurance adjuster was quick to bring the case to court.

Lo and behold, I looked at the video, checked the age of the claimant in the file, and thought to myself, "This guy looks awfully young for someone in his 50s." That’s when I figured it out. Ten minutes of looking through social media showed me that the PI had been following the claimant's 25-year-old son for two weeks.

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26. Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

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.

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27. Looking For A Second Opinion

I hired a PI to get a third-party source to confirm my ex was cheating as this was a serious issue. My ex had claimed it was only an "emotional" affair. The guy called me into his office after two days and confirmed my suspicions that the relationship was physical and that it had been going on for longer than she told me.

Day after that, he called to say, "Yeah, there's another guy that she is still talking to." I confronted my ex at our third marriage counseling session and just walked out. To get this information, I handed over my phone records, let him have my laptop for a day, and made a list of everybody we knew with phone numbers.

He also searched her car for about an hour. He found a receipt for condoms and a pregnancy test that was several months old. We didn't use condoms, and I had a vasectomy. It was the best money I have ever spent.

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28. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

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.

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29. Adult Expectations

My parents hired a PI when I was 14 and met another "teen" online. They knew if they forbid me to talk to him, I'd just rebel big time. The investigator did his thing, and my parents sat me down. They said that I was actually speaking to a 40-year-old man who had been grooming me and was trying to lure me to his state.

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30. Not Getting Through

A guy called up my detective agency to ask for Paddy, my late partner. I tell him that Paddy is deceased. The conversation that followed went something like this. Bob: Deceased? Tell him it's Bob. Me: Bob, Paddy is deceased. I can’t tell him anything. Bob: Sure, okay, whatever. Who is this again? Me: This is Dave. How can I help you?

Bob: Dave, huh? Dave... yeah, Dave, I think Paddy mentioned you. Me: I doubt it, but go ahead. How can we help? Bob: I was just calling to make sure the thing is still on for Friday? Me: What thing? Bob; The thing, you know… Me: I don't know, Bob. What? Bob: Well yeah, I know you don't "know", but is it on? Me: Bob, I have no idea what you are talking about.

Bob: Okay, I get it. Of course you don't know. But, all I'm saying is, we're good, right? Me: We are not good, Bob. I don't know what you are talking about. Bob: Of course. Got it. No idea. Great. Friday? Me: Bob, Paddy is no longer alive, so whatever you think is happening on Friday is not happening. Understand? Bob: Perfectly. Tell him I will see him then.

He then called back later and again asked for Paddy. That conversation went like this. Bob: I was told to ask for Paddy. Me: Paddy's passed. This is Dave, how can I help? Bob: Hmm, I was told to ask for Paddy. Me: You did that, and I told you that he has passed. So can I help or not? That’s when I finally learned what the heck he was talking about. He says, Well, okay. Then I need to disappear.”

Me: What do you mean, disappear? Like, from your girlfriend or from the Feds? I literally have no idea what you mean. Bob: No. Like, really disappear. Like, as if I don’t exist. Me: I don't know what movies you have watched, but there is no way to just disappear unless you have a ton of money and a body to use as a decoy.

I just made this line up on the spot to try and get the guy to shut up. But to my surprise, things got even weirder. Bob: I have three-million in cash. The body is no problem. Can you help or not? Me, not knowing what to say anymore: I can't talk about this on a cell phone. Click. And the guy never called back. It left me wondering what the heck this was all about.

I later found out from tracing the number that the call had been from a real estate investor who was being sued for millions in back taxes by the government—and that’s not even the craziest part. According to the newspapers, that same man “lost his life” in a private plane crash about a week after the phone call. Pretty suspicious, huh?

In case you are wondering, I am no longer in this business and the firm itself no longer exists.

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31. Officially Disappointed

I was once scammed out of $50 000 for a business that I wanted to purchase. The scammer used a fake name, a burner phone, and fake documents. My bank did nothing even with all the proof. A few officers said that it was out of their jurisdiction and couldn't do anything either. So, I emailed my state's attorney general.

He told me that he also couldn't do anything because it most likely happened over state lines meaning I would have to contact the US Attorney General. So, I did. I spoke to an assistant who said that I needed to contact the FBI but would probably never get my money back. The FBI said that I had to file the case online.

They also said that nothing would probably come out of it. So I came up with a plan of my own. Out of official contacts, I went online and found seven other people who were scammed by the same person. One even had audio recordings of their phone calls. The total amount was over $300,000. So, I hired an attorney to help me out with an official court case.

He said to hire a PI to find the scammer. Within 48 hours, they found out his identity and provided me with phone numbers, addresses, and business names. I shared the information with my attorney and all the others. I learned online that the scammer had already gone to prison for 20 years for running the same scam.

He and 11 others people scammed victims out of $6M in two years. The leader was also charged with setting fires six times. My attorney contacted the scammer's attorney. Now, I, as well as the other seven victims, will be getting all our money back.

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32. Terrible All Around

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.

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33. Lost Connection

My husband and his mom hired a PI to find who her biological parents were. She'd always known she was adopted when she was six months old and that her biological mother was a single woman who couldn't take care of her. But that's all she knew. The PI found her mother and found out that she was the product of an affair.

Her biological father was a wealthy businessman in 1942 in a small town in Arkansas, and her mother was his secretary. He was married so it couldn't get out that his secretary was pregnant because people in town would gossip. So, he sent her to a home for unwed mothers to have the baby and then put her up for adoption.

My mother-in-law called her biological mother and introduced herself. Her mother was hesitant to meet her but eventually agreed to it. She learned that she has two brothers and a sister with several nieces and nephews. They kept in touch for a bit but cut ties since my mother-in-law and her brother are terrible people.

That means my husband doesn't get to know his new aunts, uncles, and cousins because of his messed-up mother and uncle.

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34. I Spy

It was one of the last cases that I ever worked on. It was for a child custody and paternity case. This case was the one that made me rethink what I was doing with my life, and I got very disturbed by what I was asked to do. In other words, this is the case that made me stop being a private investigator. Here’s what happened.

Our client was denying that the child in question was actually his, and was fighting the child support case. He believed that the mother of the child was a serial adulterer. So much so that he spent THOUSANDS of dollars on the case for us to make sure there was evidence to support his claim. The icing on the cake was when my case manager told me that the client wanted video evidence showing that the child did not look like him.

The client told us that we had to record the child at play. So here I am, beside a playground, in a completely limo tinted car, videotaping a nine-year-old playing with his toys. I couldn't have possibly felt worse about my life choices. To this day, I have never felt like such a creep before. I hated that case and the case manager.

Two weeks later, I handed in my resignation.

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35. More Out There

My aunt broke ties completely with our family about 28 years ago and took her husband and two boys with her. I tried looking for one of my cousins off and on for a decade but to no avail. Finally, I hired a PI, and within a month, the investigator found him. I learned my cousin had fallen out with his immediate family.

He still had a relationship with them, but it was very strained. He also changed his name which was why I was having so much trouble finding him. Once I knew his name, I found him and his wife on Facebook. It must have seemed completely bizarre and out of the blue to them, but I had enough information to convince them.

I also let them know that there was more family out there. My aunt had apparently never told them that we existed, and there's a lot of us. The best part was that my cousin and his wife are lovely people and lived 25 minutes from where my partner and I were moving to. They ended up celebrating Thanksgiving with us all.

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36. Flash Photography

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…

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37. Sorry To See You Go

My general manager was looking into where the secretary was going at all hours of the workday without any repercussions. She got away with one and a half hour days, "working from home," a huge office where she never was, an executive parking space, countless sick days signed off by the president, and undeserved raises.

She was not good at her job, so all of her responsibilities became someone else's. So, my manager hired a private investigator to look into her. She always left early on Fridays and immediately to a hotel. Either she liked to meet a lot of men for short amounts of time or she had a second job after her regular workday. But that’s not even the most shocking thing he found.

The PI also found out that she was sleeping with the owner of the company. Well, the vice president of the company confronted the president, who admitted to the whole thing. They "fired" her and gave her 18 months of severance and had a goodbye party! In the next staff meeting, the president told us to do and be better.

This was with no context of anything that was happening so everyone looked very confused. But the secretary made out well enough.

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38. Survey Says

As a college student, I worked for a private investigations 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 towards this guy.

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39. Worst Case Scenario

I grew up in a close-knit community years ago. My mom's best friend suspected her husband of cheating and hired a PI. After a week, the PI discovered that he was cheating...with my dad. My father was always denouncing "unnatural relationships," so it was just delightful watching him squirm until he admitted the affair.

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40. Chasing Its Own Tail

A client once hired me because she wanted to know why her dog was getting fat. I shrugged, and took the job even though I thought it was a pretty weird assignment. So I shadowed the dog the next day. Turns out the dog was getting fed by almost every stranger it encountered while wandering around outside during the day.

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41. Back End Issues

My most exciting case as a licensed PI was following a woman who claimed to have a back injury. She was taking down a campsite, and I propped my camera on the tripod and sat there looking inconspicuous. It was going to be a slam dunk—but I never could’ve predicted what happened next. A car drove up to their campsite and fired off six rounds.

I didn't catch it on camera because he missed. Because the video was taken into evidence, it took two and half years for the insurance company to start their case with the woman.

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42. As A Matter Of Fact

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.

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43. Not Over You

I had broken up with my crazy ex-girlfriend for the second time and started noticing a guy following me everywhere I went. Thinking nothing of it, I just brushed him off as a neighbor. Then one time, I was sitting outside a restaurant with my dog when the guy approached me. He came and told me that my ex had hired him.

He told me he thought that she was bananas crazy. She'd threatened to fire him constantly for not producing any evidence of me with any another woman. He also said that he was ending the assignment and wanted to let me know what she was doing. Then, he told me that I was really boring. Ha. I know, man. But the story didn’t end there.

Then two weeks later, I was at the same restaurant. A gorgeous woman walking by stopped to pet my dog. Immediately, she started flirting with me. It was like she went from 0-100 in the blink of an eye. I knew something was off so asked if my ex hired her. Her face changed just as fast, and she said, "that's officially the fastest anyone has blown my cover." I was right.

My ex hired her to start a relationship with me. She wanted her to find out what was going on with me and if I was with anyone else. My ex eventually got tired of tracking me, but it was pretty messed up.

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44. Follow The Leader

I once had an interesting case in Texas. I was following a guy who supposedly had a serious back injury. Well, I caught him in the act—but not necessarily in the way I expected. I watched him go to the mall, where he met up with a woman that was not his wife. I followed them around as they shopped, and then they headed back to his vehicle where they proceeded to fool around in the car in the middle of the mall parking lot.

I filmed it, of course, but I had to call my boss to make sure that I could send this video to the client. The girl was pretty attractive, too!

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45. A Bit Of Extra Time

My mother had a feeling my stepfather was cheating on her. I was off college for the summer and offered to stake him out. Every morning he'd leave for work at 8 but had suddenly been leaving at 7 with no explanation. So early one morning, I parked my car down the street, brought my camera with zoom lenses, then waited.

He left at 7 on the dot, but instead of heading toward the city, he turned the other way. I followed him at a distance hoping he wouldn't notice my orange car. He drove for two miles into a suburb and parked outside one of the houses. So, I parked and got out holding my camera covering it with the bottom of my T-shirt.

I strolled across the street, and after about 15 minutes, he came out of the house. He was waiting on the steps, and I snapped a few photos. Then this woman who I had never seen before came outside. I took more pictures as they got into his car and drove away. By the time I got to my car, they’d already been long gone.

I tried to give chase, but there were too many traffic lights, and I lost them. So, the next day, I brought my friend with me. We followed him back to the woman's house and this time parked behind his car about five houses down. As soon as they came out and got in the car, we were ready and tailed them. It wasn't easy.

I didn't want to be right behind them, but so many cars kept cutting in that I was getting further and further away. Then it was the red lights. I ran a couple of late yellows and even some reds when I was sure no traffic was coming from either direction. We were almost downtown even though he worked south of the city.

So, I didn't know where he would go. My friend and I struggled to keep our eyes on them. Luckily, they turned into a parking lot and parked. I parked across the street in a no-parking zone taking my chances with a meter maid. We went into the big parking lot and as close as possible to his car without them noticing us.

We saw them just sitting and talking as we got closer. Then they started to kiss! It was a total make-out session. I got my camera out and took dozens of photos of them sucking face. After they finished, she got out, and they both headed to work. My mom's lawyer thanked me for the photos, which he said were a gold mine!

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46. Space Invaders

I had a case referred to me by an attorney I worked for. It involved a woman who was convinced that her condo maintenance man was going into her home while she was gone and moving things around. She had bought the condo from him originally. In other words, it was his former condo. I met her to discuss the case and she seemed rational.

She was an attractive older woman. The guy would obviously be familiar with the condo layout and would have access to the key. Heck, I've seen weirder things. So we proceeded. She agreed to let me install a hidden camera setup with a motion detector. She was to call me if anything happened to make her think he had been there.

A couple of days go by and she calls. I go by and get the tape, since this was before digital recordings. I check the footage out. There's nothing on it but her. I meet her to tell her this. Her reaction made my blood run cold. She says, "Oh, he must have some machine that makes him invisible. He's a space alien, after all." She had not previously mentioned this vital tidbit of information.

I told her that that level of technology was beyond my ability to deal with and that we should talk it over with her attorney to determine what the best course of action might be going forward. I called the attorney to let him know that our client had some issues, and we were able to get her some psychological help. But most importantly, her check was good!

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47. I Just Live Here

My mom rented to a tenant who kept giving her checks that bounced and fake wire transfer information. She found out that he was not the "famous" author whose name he went by. Instead, he was wanted in two states for bad cheques and owing child support. He got by in life by scamming women romantically and ripping off landlords.

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48. Strong Man

I worked for a private investigator company that mostly handled workers' compensation cases for insurance companies or other employers. I was assigned to a case in Seattle where a guy was claiming an upper back and shoulder injury. After a few hours on site at his house, he pulls up in a truck and proceeds to empty the truck bed of landscaping equipment. Alone.

After he has put everything away, he walks over to the side of his neighbor’s house, pulls out a piece of the siding of the building, withdraws a pipe, and smokes it in front of me. All on camera.

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49. Taking A Hit

When I used to teach martial arts, two serious-looking people in suits came into the club to speak to my boss. They told him that two of his students, a married couple in their late 40s, were claiming disability benefits. After a workplace accident years before, one often needed a wheelchair while the other had a cane.

The couple had won awards at an interclub tournament and had been mentioned in a local newspaper. Their benefits liaison saw the snippet and arranged for a PI to do some digging. The PI found much more information than he had expected. He wanted my boss to sign a testimony detailing how long they had been his students.

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50. Strange Brew

I was asked to help my boss fire another investigator due to his short temper. I was told to arrive at 7:30, because he likes to arrive at 8:00. So, like any other day, I woke up and started to drive to work through a terrible blizzard. I didn't end up getting there till 7:40. I go to my boss, who says he already fired the guy before I arrived.

What the heck, man? What if he had lashed out and what not when I wasn't there? His reply was that he didn't, but that he wanted me to still stick around just in case. So I sat there for four hours drinking coffee on double time, which was great until I had to file the two-page report on me drinking coffee. But yeah, I can’t complain about getting to drink coffee for 35 bucks an hour.

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51. Improper Investigation

My sister is in her mid-30s and adopted. So, she hired a PI to find her estranged biological father. The investigator reported back that not only was he still alive and nearby but had a daughter. That meant that she also had a biological sister. More digging showed that she and her sister shared the very same birthday.

It seemed that meant that my sister had a twin, and her birth father vanished with her. It was big, life-changing news for my sister. But the investigator came back and told her that her sister was really just her. There was no other sister. He'd been investigating my sister the whole time. We asked for our money back.

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52. Battle Scars

My RA during my sophomore year of college was a part-time private investigator, and he loved to brag about it to the new coed underclassmen. A few weeks before spring break, he showed up with visible bruising and two black eyes. Apparently, some guy he had been following to try and catch in an affair had gotten a hold of him and beaten him to a pulp.

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53. Down The Bunny Hill

When I was a private investigator, I was paid to follow a wealthy couple's daughter who was a senior in college and stopped returning their calls. They were worried about her. So, they paid me almost $40 thousand for around-the-clock monitoring just to find out that their daughter dropped out to be a full-time ski bum.

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54. No-Tell Motel

I've worked on a few bizarre cases over the years. There was one interesting workers’ compensation case from last year. I was told to get film of this older lady who had supposedly been on total disability due to a severe ankle injury. Seems cut and dry. But she lived in a motel in the middle of nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

The motel was called "Johnnie’s." I looked up the place online and found reviews of it on Google. There were really lousy reviews, including one that said the place was mostly run by the owner's son, who was a substance user, and would ask people who stayed there if he could buy any prescription medication from them. That isn't sketchy at all.

So I show up to this “motel,” which looked like it hadn't been renovated in 40 years. It was a small motel that had about 14 rooms. I have no idea what room the person I'm supposed to find is in. I figure I should talk to someone at the front desk. Turns out there is no front desk. The office part of the motel looked boarded up.

But next to it was one of the motel rooms, and in the window of the room was an "Open" sign. On the door, there was a sign that said "office" and instructions for long term customers of the hotel on where to drop their payments. There was a doorbell. I rang it and waited. The guy who opened the door looked exactly like Kenny Powers from Eastbound and Down.

He was wearing a Ninja Turtles t-shirt and Hawaiian shorts. He tells me to come in. I walk in, and what I walk into is just a room with one desk. Nothing else. There was shaggy carpeting, some really dark colored walls, and a lava lamp on the desk. I realize that this was the owner's son, Johnnie Junior. I give him some fake story about how I'm an insurance adjuster looking for this lady.

He then replies: "Oh, Mary? She lives in the room next to me, want me to go get her?" This is a problem because I have absolutely no backstory on what to tell this lady. She was represented by an attorney and likely knew a private investigator might be looking for her. I tell him no, and that I just needed to confirm that she lived here. I then bolted.

I parked in the parking lot with a view of the room that Johnnie Junior had pointed at. A couple of hours go by, and then some old guy standing near my car starts getting stuff out of his car. Johnnie Junior walks out and starts talking to him. I realize the older guy is Johnnie Senior. They are literally standing right next to my car and I can hear everything they say.

What proceeds to happen is they start talking about me. Well, at least about the "insurance adjuster" who had visited earlier. Johnnie Senior, having seen some stuff in his day, immediately says: "That wasn't an insurance adjuster, you idiot, that was a private investigator! Insurance adjusters don't work on Sundays!"

He tells Johnnie Junior to tell Mary to watch out because an investigator might be in the parking lot. My car is tinted. I think I'll be fine. Not so fast. The parking lot I'm in is shared with a diner. The owner of the diner comes out and starts talking to Johnnie Senior. Apparently, I had parked in front of a shed that the motel cleaning staff used.

Johnnie Senior now starts talking to the owner of the diner and asking her if my car belonged to any of her employees or any of the people in the diner currently. She says she'll ask around, and she leaves. Johnnie Senior then goes into one of the motel rooms, where apparently he lives. He constantly stands in the doorway looking at my car. I leave as soon as he looks the other way. But I still got what I came for.

I came back later in the day and successfully get film of the lady I was supposed to watch. She was totally faking her injury. Johnnie Junior and his girlfriend actually came out a couple of times to try and figure out what car might be an investigator's car. But because they had seen my car earlier that day, they didn't seem to suspect it as suspicious.

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55. Mother's Intuition

When my mom's best friend divorced her husband, she had full custody of their daughter. But her husband's family was crazy. One day in 1977, he took his daughter and disappeared with his parents. She tried hiring a PI to find them but couldn't afford one. So, she took matters into her own hands. She started to teach herself how to trace people on her own.

Whenever she wasn't waitressing, she was following leads to find her daughter. Then in '81, she found her. When she'd gone to meet her, so much time had passed that her daughter had been poisoned against her. She moved on and got her PI license. She then went on to specialize in woman's issues for the next two decades.

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56. Woman’s Best Friend

An older gentleman hires the investigator, as he believes his young and attractive wife is cheating on him. The investigator follows the wife for an extended period of time but does not discover any liaisons. To make a long story short, the investigator eventually makes a disturbing discovery. The young wife had been sleeping with the household dog. Yes, you read that right.

Apparently, the wife had been extremely emotionally frustrated because she wasn't getting any from her over the hill husband, but she couldn't bring herself to actually cheat on him. Enter the dog…

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57. Looking Back

When my dad got my 15-year-old mom pregnant, her father forced her to put the baby up for adoption. Nobody ever mentioned it. I only found out because my dad drank himself silly and talked about what was bothering him. He never got over the loss of his oldest son, my mom who cheated on him, and losing my little sister.

When we were married, my ex-wife decided that she wanted to find my older brother. I was against looking for him since he probably didn't know that he was adopted, and I didn't want to ruin that. Well, she hit a roadblock when my paternal grandfather would not cooperate but got as many details as she could from my mom.

After getting my parent's hopes up, I agreed to hire a PI. We found someone who looked like my family, a website to a small company that he founded, as well as links to his other many high-profile jobs. A college professor had adopted him and given him a good life—a life that was much better than what he would've had.

I gathered the report, pictures of his biological family, and some medical information and sent him a package. He never responded. But years later, I found out he was divorced around the same time, so I thought that maybe his ex-never gave him the package. So, I joined social media just to search for him and found him.

I sent a message telling him who I was, why I was contacting him, and why he had been put up for adoption. At the end, I requested that he would at the very least tell me off so I could get some kind of closure for my parents. He ended up setting his page to private, and I never heard from him. I lost my mom years ago.

But she was glad to know that he was well and successful, but she never got to meet him. My dad is much better now, but I know that it still eats away at him.

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58. I Saw The Light

I did surveillance for insurance cases for a short time. We would usually just be assigned to follow someone for a couple of days, unless we found something that warranted more time. On my first day watching this one guy, he leaves his house about seven hours into my eight-hour workday. I follow him out of the neighborhood, then out of the town, then onto the highway...

I start wondering where he could possibly be going to. Eventually, he pulls into the downtown area of the nearest metropolitan city and heads into a valet parking ramp. I panicked a bit because I had my video camera, laptop, and all the background paperwork sitting on the passenger seat next to me. I was able to shove all that stuff away or grab it into a pocket before I turned my car over to the valet.

I ended up riding the elevator out of the garage with the guy and his family. They were going to see the seasonal holiday light parade thing, so that was nice to watch at least.

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59. Empty Evidence

My brother injured his back at work due to his employer's unsafe work practices. During the suit, my brother's lawyer received a folder full of documents from the employer's team. They had hired a PI to investigate and prove that he was faking his injury. Well, that investigator had apparently not been a very good one.

The photos were of me operating an ATV-mounted leafhopper. So, my brother walked into the court hearing and introduced himself. He watched the color of the opposing lawyers' faces slowly drain as they realized he looked nothing like me.

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60. Being A Jerk Doesn’t Pay

My boss once hired a private investigator. He never told me, but I was snooping around the network one day and came across a document that was a chain of cut-and-pasted emails between the boss and the guy he secretly hired. I worked for a playground design and construction company. Very small, and the boss was an absolute jerk.

He may have been bipolar, because he would be happy one minute and then the tiniest problem, like a slide being a slightly different color to what he thought it should be, would send him off the rails for the rest of the day. Anyway, according to this document, he was suspicious that his competitor was able to offer playgrounds for cheaper than him and still make money.

He had a strong suspicion that the competitor was using illegal immigrants to build the playgrounds and paying them in cash, for less than the minimum wage. This is in Australia, not the United States, so this is probably very uncommon here. The detective went to a construction site and talked to a bunch of the workers.

He returned a report that stated that the workers were cooperative, that they did not appear to be foreign, that they spoke English very well, and that they even showed him their driver’s licenses. He left totally satisfied that the workers were legitimate Australian citizens. And then, inexplicably, my boss got mad at these results and refused to pay the guy.

The rest of the document was the detective arguing that he did the work and should be paid for it. The bill was for at least a few thousand dollars, I think. My jerk boss wrote him back and argued that he just knew that those guys weren't allowed to work and that if the private investigator couldn’t prove that, then he wasn’t a very good investigator and didn’t deserve to be paid.

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61. Eyes Everywhere

My grandfather once hired a PI to investigate my grandmother. While spying on her from his car, another investigator he knew came up frantically to his window. He asked him, "What are you doing here!?" He responded incredulously, "What are YOU doing here?" He told him that the DEA was also investigating my grandmother.

I don't think anything came from the investigation, but we're all certain it was the reason the old family barn burned down.

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62. A Graceful Excuse

I was once asked by a lady to investigate her husband because she thought that he might be cheating on her. Apparently, he used to come back late at night with the smell of women’s perfume on his clothes. So I tailed him to see what was really going on—that’s when I found out a twist that even I never could’ve predicted. Turns out, he was taking dancing classes and didn't want to tell his wife.

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63. Taking It Personally

I worked for a PI who was a big biker-looking guy. I called him Santa because of his white beard and hearty laugh. In my three months working with him, we had a lot of insurance cases. It was a lot of sitting in a car, reading a book, and occasionally taking photos of somebody in a cast getting in and out of their car.

But there was this case with a woman in her 30s who came to us wanting to find her birth mother. We spent a month with the usual visiting courthouses, city halls, and libraries to try and find her. It was taking longer than usual since we didn't have the mother's name. All she knew were her late adopted parents' names.

There wasn't any paperwork, and she didn't know where it would be. Finally, I found the paperwork in a courthouse in the next county over. I had a name. I was running late so just went to drop the copies at his office. Santa stopped me when I was leaving. He'd seen from the paperwork that the birth mother was actually his wife.

His wife who'd given up a baby over 30 years before. So, he called her. She dug up her old paperwork, and sure enough, it all matched up. We called the client but didn't get an answer. We went to pick up his wife and drove to the client's home. She had been on the phone with her adopted sister talking about our search.

Santa and his wife immediately bear-hugged the woman who looked very confused. Both were too emotional to get any words out. So, I explained to her that the woman was her birth mother and Santa was her husband. It was a beautiful scene.

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64. Taking Out The Trash

A few years back, I accidentally became the owner of a detective agency. I intended to just be an investment partner, but the owner and the actual detective both passed shortly after I made my investment. So, all of a sudden, I now owned an entire detective agency. After quickly getting the various licenses and all, I just started taking cases.

The entirety of what I knew about how to be a detective was from various TV shows, movies, and books. For cases, I would just rely on random people whose life has become so bad that they decided to call a private investigator was the next logical step. Much later, I learned that normal investigators never take these so-called "domestic" cases because they are always a huge mess.

Real investigators get almost all of their work from lawyers, and hire off-duty officers to do all of the leg work. As a result of my not knowing this, I had a ton of crazy cases. Practically several TV seasons’ worth of them. Here is one ridiculous one that I will never forget. This 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. We watch the video the next day. The video reveals that it was just the wind. The client freaks out, and says that his neighbor could have had an invisibility field or could have been moving too fast to show up on camera, “like The Flash.” He wanted to pay us thousands of dollars to rent a heat-seeking camera or one that can shoot thousands of frames per second.

Turns out lots of crazy people call PIs to investigate the TV controlling them, alien abduction, etc.

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65. A Bad State

One day, we were sitting on the porch looking through old photo albums when we came across a picture of my grandmother and her older brother. Back when they were little, her grandmother and her husband took them in when they'd lost their parents. They were at the state fair when their uncle kidnapped her older brother.

Apparently, he wasn't happy that his mother and another man were raising his nephew. A couple of years after she told us that story, my grandmother's health started to decline. It'd been over 60 years since she’d seen her brother, and my mother and aunt hired a PI to look for him. He managed to find him down in Brazil.

Their uncle brought him there, and he'd never left. He'd even started a family. My grandmother got to reconnect with him over video calls and meet an entire part of her family she never knew about. They talked on the phone and video called regularly up until she was gone.

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66. Framed By Frame

I was once hired by this lady in an abusive relationship who wanted to divorce her husband, but apparently needed the husband's permission according to their religious customs. The husband refused to give her his permission. So she wanted us to hire some woman to seduce him, get it on video, and then mail the tape to the church leaders to show that their marriage was broken.

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67. Believe It Or Not

My sister was 15 when she was kidnapped from our home. There was a note from her that said she was "leaving for a better life," but we didn't believe it. But because of it, she was considered a runaway, which meant that there would be no amber alert for her. My uncle knew a PI who we hired right away to find my sister.

Within the first 24 hours of her disappearance, he found a string of emails from "Stan" with a description of the car that was coming to get her. Stan was 27 but in Florida. Officers went to his house where he was alone. He'd promised my sister that they'd live an "amazing" life together and hired someone to drive her.

Stan had told the driver that my family mistreated my sister and she wasn't safe with us. The driver bought it and was on his way back to Stan. Undercover officers tailed him waiting for him to stop for gas just in case he was armed. I got my sister back, and after years of therapy, she's great with an awesome partner.

Stan ended up in federal prison after his trial where I testified against him. We learned that he spent almost two years coaxing my sister to trust him through an online game. That meant she was 13 and he was 25 when everything started.

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68. Guilty As Charged

This crook was serving 20 years for hiring a hitman to target his friend. Unbeknownst to him, the hitman happened to be an undercover officer. In the slammer, he came into some money and hired us to try and prove that he was innocent. His plan to do this was to have us tell his friend that he better recant his testimony or else our client would use his new money to hire a hitman “to do it for real this time.”

This genius told us this plan on a recorded phone call from the facility he was in.

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69. Never Ever

My grandpa had a younger brother, John, who’d always been the black sheep of the family. My grandpa was protective of John and always defended him when friends or family gave him a hard time. John asked my grandpa one day to borrow a couple of thousand dollars, which was no small sum in the 60s, for him to buy a house.

After talking it over with my grandma, they gave him the loan. John then swiftly skipped town and never contacted them. My grandpa never talked about it after that. Then in the 80s, my mom's cousin was curious about what happened to John and hired a PI to find him. They were living in northern British Columbia, Canada.

After a while, the PI found John in Vancouver. He'd actually been living on the streets of downtown. So, my grandmother and her sister flew to see him and try to bring him home to my grandpa who still wanted nothing to do with it. But when they met John, his reaction was chilling. My grandma said that he was absolutely livid that they found him.

He had made the streets of downtown Vancouver his home and lived with a small group of people who he treated like his family. He angrily told my grandma and her sister that he was very content with his life the way it was, to leave, and to never contact him again. So, they got back on a plane and flew home without him.

Private Investigators Find factsShutterstock

70. Denial Isn’t Just A River In Egypt

I once got hired by a wife who wanted to see if her husband was sleeping with his secretary. We followed them, and recorded them going into his single-bed hotel room at approximately 10:20 pm after a nice dinner out. I then recorded them leaving together the next morning at 8:00 am. When I brought the tape back to my client, she was very upset—but what she said next was jaw-dropping.

She said that the video proves nothing, as they could have just been working late…

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71. Daddy's Right Here

My father likes to act like I don't exist. He lived in another state and owed well over $20 thousand in child support. He's in the US army but never took any of the money he's entitled to. Because if he did, it'd alert social services and force him to owe even more money. The weird part was that his sister reached out to me.

After a while, my mom was tired of him dodging payments and hired a PI. She asked him to find out where my father lived and worked and about his family. Well, the PI found him. Instead of across the country, he was just a few blocks away with his sister. The same sister who wanted to "get lunch" with me after 15 years.

My father isn't your typical absent dad. He'd actually tried to total his truck by driving straight into a brick wall in an attempt to get rid of my mom who was pregnant with me. Never has he or anyone in his family met me. Finding out that the same sadistic man was living so close to me made me feel unsafe for months.

Over $500 later, all we got was disappointment and uneasiness. Social services never got evidence of his residence or work.

Private Investigators Find factsShutterstock

72. It’s Not What You Find, It’s What You Don’t Find!

I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to go out on many interesting cases over the years, but the most shocking one I’ve ever had was the one where I was hired to investigate a husband because the wife was suspicious of all the times he had to "work late," only to find out he really was working late. It was the only time where the person wasn’t cheating.

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73. Just Doublechecking

My dad was using illicit substances and in a rough spot when he broke out into a severe psychotic state. His paranoia was so bad that he'd hired a private investigator to look into my mom because he thought she was cheating on him. When that investigator came back with nothing suspicious, my dad hired another PI to investigate the first.

Private Investigators Find factsShutterstock

74. It’s Electric

I once went out on a case that involved a teenager who had opened a high voltage electrical cabinet. He stuck his arm inside and his metal wristwatch melted into his wrist. He almost lost his life in the incident. His family was trying to sue the power company, claiming that the barbed wire fence enclosure and the double lock-sealed cabinet was "inadequate" protection.

They wanted their kid to be compensated. I don't know how this case ended up. I just turned in my reports and moved on.

Private investigatorsShutterstock

75. Jumping Into A Relationship

My wife's grandfather passed years ago. Then a few years after, her grandmother met a charming gentleman in his 70s. Both widowed, they started a relationship and eventually married. My less than lovely mother-in-law and her crazy sister decided that the marriage was a terrible mistake, thinking that he was after money.

So, they hired a PI to follow him around. He found out that the gentleman was nothing special—just a widower with adult children who lived out of state. He lived in a modest apartment, but the only thing that stood out to the investigator was the upscale retirement home he visited once a week. The security was tight.

So tight that the PI wasn't able to get through the front door. My mother-in-law and her sister ambushed the man with this information and demanded that he tell them what he was doing there. Rightfully so, he politely told them to mind their own business. What they did was absolutely brutal. First, they contacted their late father's brother who was a lawyer.

They wanted power of attorney over their elderly mother to stop her from getting married. But the uncle, seeing that she was happy, refused. Finally, they found a lawyer who took the case but charged a lot upfront. By that point, the sisters had made such a big mess of everything that it’d made the gentleman miserable.

So much so that he felt that the relationship was not worth it and broke everything off with their mother. The sisters then decided to proceed with taking power of attorney over their elderly mother to protect her from "all the other men who wanted to scam her." They met to see whether the case would continue to court.

My wife's grandmother showed up with her two lawyers who crushed and destroyed her daughters' attorney. It was quite the spectacle. They then learned that the gentleman was actually loaded—in the millions! He had been visiting his 98-year-old mother at the upscale retirement home. It was quite the exclusive place.

All kinds of important political people retired there and had butlers as well as gourmet chefs on staff. After some time, my wife's grandmother passed miserable, broke, and fighting with her daughters. She got the last laugh leaving her house to her son who never got involved. He demolished the home then sold the land.

Lawyers Face-Palm factsShutterstock

76. Lick It Up

I’m a private investigator. Someone wanted to know what their cat was up to when they were working, so they paid me to tail it. I don't like wasting my time, but work is not always easily available in this field, so I took the assignment. Turns out the cat just walks around the streets, licks itself, and climbs trees…

Private investigatorsPexels

77. Crossing Sides

My mom hired a PI to find her biological mom. She'd wanted to find both her parents but didn't have enough saved. But the investigator found her dad too while looking for her mother. He was living in a house that she’d passed on her cross country runs in high school and never knew it. She learned that she had siblings.

She has three older half-brothers, and I have two new cousins. Unfortunately, after she found her biological family, my mom decided to leave and live with them. My parents weren't on the best of terms, which she saw as a sign. I haven't seen her in almost a year, and it's complicated my relationship with my new family.

Glitch In The Matrix FactsShutterstock

78. Reeling Them In

I was hired by a private investigation firm to work at a company that was having a problem with workplace harassment. He wanted me to dress scantily and report anyone who verbally or physically came on to me. I was a teenager at the time, and I really didn't understand what being hired as bait could mean. I was used by that jerk.

Private investigatorsPexels

79. Making Families

My partner and I adopted our son from an orphanage in Bulgaria in the early 90s. When we were there, we fell in love with a three-year-old girl who we wanted to adopt too. The orphanage said that they had very little information on her and no papers for adoption. So, we hired an investigator to research her background.

If he found her family, we could get them to sign the release papers. Except we found more than we bargained for. Her father was in prison for the death of the girl's mother. She also had a grandmother who wasn't aware of her or that she was staying at the orphanage. So, the grandmother asked for custody of the little girl.

It was approved, and she went on to live with her grandmother. We think of her often and wonder how her life turned out. She'd be in her 30s now.

Gloria Vanderbilt FactsShutterstock

80. It’s Not What It Looks Like!

So there I was, trailing a woman that a guy thought was cheating on him with an old boyfriend. It led me to a hotel where I got some pretty steamy video footage. When I went back to the guy's house to drop off the invoice, I overheard him fighting with the girl. Something about her meeting up with the guy for some kisses, and that was all.

Fun stuff!

Private investigatorsUnsplash

81. Around The World And Back Again

My brother and I moved to the US from Japan with my dad after our parents divorced in 1969. As the years passed, we eventually lost contact with my mother after she remarried. When I retired a few years ago, I decided to look for my family in Japan. I flew there and managed to find where my grandparent's house had been.

But it was just an empty lot. I flew back home not knowing what to do next. Two years later, I looked for private investigators online. One investigator and I exchanged emails where I shared the 50-year-old information not expecting much from it. A week later though, he found an aunt and my mother. I flew to meet them.

It had been 50 years, and I finally got to see my mother. When I was back in the US, I enrolled in a local college to start relearning Japanese at the age of 65. Then the pandemic happened, and I'm just waiting until travel restrictions are lifted.

Happy Endings FactsShutterstock

82. Money Talks

One of the funniest things about this business is how many angry clients like this just come barging in and making ridiculous demands. They all seem to think they’re in a movie or something. Sometimes, they’ll even scream things out like, "cost is no object," right up until we tell them that we charged $100 per hour. Then cost suddenly becomes an object…

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83. Sheriff Himself

There was one guy in my men's group at church. We were talking about how adult content affects the brain and relationships. This guy talked about his time as a sheriff and shared all of the horrific details with us. His stories were always very unsettling, but we listened. Plus, we thought that his sharing was helping him get through his past.

A few months after the study ended, this guy vanished. He left his wife, got into his car, and just disappeared. Another sheriff had joined the church, started talking to him, and spooked him. His wife hired a PI to find out why he’d suddenly left. The PI found out that his entire life story was made up—he'd never been a sheriff, in the army, or from the state he told us.

His name hadn't even been real! He was the most convincing liar I've ever met. He cried when he'd tell his stories, had an infectious laugh, and was always ready to talk with a friendly smile. We had no idea.

Dramatic Class Reunion Stories factsShutterstock

84. Not What We Do

I was asked by a prospective client to kidnap a child whose parents were in the middle of an ugly custody battle. One of the parents was keeping the child in violation of a court order, and this family member thought that coming to me and making this request would be the easiest solution. Nope. I’m afraid I had to take a firm pass on that one...

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85. Always On My Mind

My grandmother and great-grandmother had baby boys weeks apart. My grandma loved her brother like a second son. When he grew up, he got married and had a daughter. His wife, however, became an addict and left him with their daughter Bri, who was an infant at the time. One day, he went to a bar where an officer was drinking and dancing.

Wasted, he took out his piece, raised it in the air, and pulled the trigger. It immediately hit my grandmother's brother. She sued law enforcement and was generously compensated. The money went to Bri, but a few weeks later, someone took Bri. And for years and years, my grandmother had searched for Bri. She hired a PI.

But they'd never found anything useful. They only knew that the money was gone. Over 30 years later, my grandmother learned how to use social media. First thing she did was of course search for Bri. And she found her! She came to live closer to us for a bit, but we all could tell that she didn't feel like she belonged.

Evil Pranks factsShutterstock

86. Small World

My grandfather was a private investigator. He was once asked to tail a well-known delivery truck around its route leaving Central Scotland, traveling south, and then back again. He took up the case and followed the truck, but he was shocked at what he found. It turned out that my other grandfather was the one driving the truck! They never did speak to one another from what I can remember.

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87. Watch Yourself

During a custody battle with my child's father, he was only allowed supervised visitation with his parents being the supervisors. As the weeks went by, I was concerned about whether the supervision was actually happening, since I would run into his parents at the grocery store when they were supposed to be at the visit. So, I took matters into my own hands.

There was one incident when I sent my infant son to a five-hour visit and got him back in the same marked diaper. So, I hired a PI. Over the next few weeks, what he observed confirmed my suspicions—they weren't supervising the visits. I was not surprised.

Betty Grable FactsShutterstock

88. Mowing Down His Case

This was the funniest case I’ve ever heard of by far, in my opinion. My brother-in-law is a private eye. One time, he was hired to follow around a worker comp victim with an allegedly bad back. He filmed the victim lifting a lawnmower into a truck bed. A riding lawnmower. With his bare hands. And with no struggle whatsoever. How ridiculous is that!

Private investigatorsPexels

89. Who’s Your Daddy

After he’d passed, my great-grandfather had left some money for my mom and her sisters. They were expecting much more than they received. The will explicitly stated, "to my grandchildren," but the lawyer could not tell them who the other grandchildren were. Well, my mom's dad had admitted to cheating on my grandmother.

So, my mom and her half-sisters hired a private investigator to find if their father had any other children. They found out that not only did he have two sons with two different women but also that one of these women worked with my dad.

Crazy Wills FactsShutterstock

90. Inception

I once got hired to follow another private investigator who, it turns out, was also hired to follow me. I’m still not quite sure what that was all about…

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91. Physical Difficulty

I worked for a company that investigated insurance cases. One case was the usual bad back injury, which the guy said hurt so much that he could barely walk, couldn't work, and needed 24-hour assistance for everyday life. The investigator followed him around recording him going about his day. He then gave the DVD to me.

I played the DVD and watched the man "with a back injury" walk around, bend down, twist his torso, and all sorts of “impossible” actions. If that wasn't enough, he did one thing that shocked me. He did a backflip. He stood on a bench and did a backflip off it. We showed him the video, and he quickly withdrew his claim.

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92. Horse Power

I’m a private investigator. I once had to work a case involving a missing horse. While I was investigating, I ended up almost getting shot by a bunch of angry rednecks. Due to reasons beyond my control, I’m not sure if I can mention any more specific details about that case. But suffice it to say that I spent a lot of time that evening thinking about what I was doing with my life…

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93. Job Insecurity

I worked at a small firm that provided security guards and private investigators. An electric store hired a security guard for the night shift. One night, we got a call from the guard. He told us that he'd been beaten and tied to a chair. He’d been able to escape to call officers and our office to report what happened.

The three guys managed to pry the back door open and subdue the guard. They then went on to get away with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory. The guard looked pretty bad and sounded pretty shaken up. Except two days later, officers found everything that they’d taken from the store. The thieves weren’t very careful.

And it made sense why—it was an inside job! It was our brilliant security guard’s idea for the heist, and he recruited his brother and cousins to help him

Glitch In The Matrix FactsShutterstock

94. Retracing Her Steps

A private investigator came into the bar I was bartending at years ago, and showed me two pictures. One was of a girl in her early 20s whose family was trying to track her down, and one of a guy in his late 20s that they suspected she had run away with. The guy in the picture had a charge on his debit card from my bar from a week earlier, so the investigator came in hoping that I would remember if the girl was with him that night.

I did not recognize the girl at all, but I remembered the guy. He had come in with two other guys around his age. They all got pretty intoxicated, but all they really did was shoot pool. They didn't cause any problems and they actually tipped me really well. I never heard anything else about the girl, so I don't know if the family eventually found her or if she disappeared for good.

I just now remembered that her first name was Katie. I can't remember the guy's name though.

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95. Getting Warmer

I worked as a Skip Tracer in the early 2000s for a credit card bank. My ability to track people down put me on a task force that went after people who'd skipped out on their payments. Except these people had little to no contact information. So, it was quite the challenge. I was in my early 20s and clever with my ways.

I could do anything as long as I didn't break any debt collection laws. Once, I found this guy who was in South America doing a religious mission. He had very, very little access to a phone. He could only use one for an hour of one day each week. And it was my job to call around to find information on how to reach him.

I finally got him on the phone, and he was so flabbergasted that I found him that he wanted to know how I did. Well, I told him that I’d called his mom who told me about his mission. Then I called a local church to "confirm" the church he went through. The church corrected me on that and the pastor who worked with him.

Then, I called that pastor. I explained to him that I had just spoken about getting a phone number with the mother who suggested him. He gave it to me then told me when the debtor was expected to be there. It took me a few tries, but I got him. He directed me to his parents who worked out a payment arrangement for him.

Bosses Fired factsShutterstock

96. Not What You Were Expecting To Find

I have a story about this. My brother was a private investigator in the early 1990s. He worked for a law firm. I was in my early 20s, and so he got me a gig as a process server. He was working a particularly nasty divorce case. The husband was a Jordanian national married to an American woman. She found out that she was one of several wives that the man had.

She decided that she didn’t want to be the broodmare in the family and wanted out. Also, she worked for NASA. Anyway, my brother was tasked with going into their house, which was in her name, and getting a briefcase with financial information in it. Since I was the process server, I had to go along in case someone was home for whatever reason.

We went and waited down the road until everyone left, then we went in and got the briefcase. No big deal. We take it back to the attorney's office and he calls the lady to tell her that he has it. She gives him the combination. He opens it up, and freaks out about what he sees. It was full of technical plans from Boeing for the Apache helicopter.

The attorney just says "Oh my gosh!" He then instantly shuts the briefcase and tells me and my brother to leave right away, so we did. We never heard anything more about that case at all, other than the fact that he contacted the FBI over it. My assumption is that the guy had been plotting some kind of serious attack on a plane. So yeah, things took quite a twist.

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97. The Hardworking Husband

When I first met my wife, she seemed to have a normal modern family with two moms and two dads. Over the years, it became apparent that her stepdad was never around that much for holidays, birthdays, you name it. He'd pop in, say hi, grab a nap or whatever, then take off again. This was just normal to my wife's family.

It was just the way it had always been since they were teenagers. He claimed to have a job following FedEx trucks around the state as security. But to me, it was strange, and I started making jokes about him having another family. Well, that got my sister-in-law thinking because she was owed a favor from the PI at her firm.

Sure enough, he had not one but three other wives around the state with five other stepchildren between them. My sister-in-law told her mother who then immediately changed the locks and filed for divorce. They haven't spoken since. The divorce was even uncontested. They also sent the report to let his other wives know.

Private Investigators FactsShutterstock

98. She’s Seen That Movie Before

I worked for a private investigation firm, though not as one of the detectives. The saddest case we had was a stunning 24- or 26-year old-woman whose 60-year-old accountant husband was suspected of sleeping with his secretary. The secretary looked like she had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

The client hired us to follow him on a night he was “working late.” Sure enough, he and the sleazy secretary left the office on time and went to a bar together. After a few drinks, they retired to her car and we got some pretty revealing footage of them going at it in the back seat. Classy! We gave the footage and report over to the client, who promptly burst into tears and paid the $1,800 or so invoice.

The saddest part of the story? She came back four more times. And each time, he was caught literally with his pants down. He never learned his lesson. We caught him at the secretary's house, in the car, in the office with the blinds open in the middle of the day, you name it. After about $15k worth of invoices, we actually sat down with her and explained that we were going to stop taking her work.

It just felt cruel to keep taking her money to show her more and more footage of her husband going at it with this ugly woman, over and over and over again. We never saw her again. I hope she took him for all he was worth.

Private investigatorsShutterstock

99. Copy Cats

I worked as a private investigator for about a year once when I was much younger. This was a case that I didn’t take, and it will be obvious by the end why I didn't. We had an office on the ground floor of a building near the county courthouse, with a door that opened to the street. This meant we actually got a fair amount of foot traffic.

If I had nothing going on, I closed the office around 5:00 pm. Around 4:45 pm one day, a lady comes in asking all the usual questions. "Are you really a detective?," "What cases do you take?," "How much do you charge?," etc. I spend 10 minutes going through all that with her. This lady seems pretty wound up, which is not unusual, as people don't typically come in looking for our services when everything is great.

Often, it's because they are having one of the worst experiences of their lives and are desperate for help and haven't gotten it elsewhere. I ask her to tell me what brought her in today and to be as detailed as possible. She tells me that someone copied her ideas and that now she's being followed. I'm thinking, great, a potential intellectual property case.

I ask her to start from the beginning. What were these ideas? She starts telling me about her last gynecological exam. I immediately stop her and ask what this has to do with her ideas being copied. She flips out. She begins screaming about how the doctor implanted a listening device inside her and that this is how they are aware of her ideas.

I do my best not to react. She screams, "You don't believe me either! But I have proof!" She runs out of the office and comes back a minute later with a large envelope. She pulls out x-rays of her pelvic region and shoves them in my face. "See! Right there, that white spot on my ovary. That's clearly the listening device!"

I agree that there is a small white dot, but I also tell her I'm not a doctor or an expert in listening devices and can't confirm that it is one. In reality, it didn't look like anything to me. I knew it wasn't an electronic device of any kind, let alone one that could capture your ideas and transmit them to vans that were following you around.

She goes on to tell me how the doctor was in on it and that they were taking her ideas and making them into TV shows for Telemundo. This is the part where I tell you that this middle-aged, blonde-haired, blue-eyed lady didn't speak a word of Spanish. I ask her about the vans that were following her. She says they were different colors and often different drivers.

But they were definitely following her around and that's how they were collecting her ideas. I'm looking for a polite way to tell this lady I won't be taking her case, but she won't let up and insists I do something about it. I finally catch a break. I tell her the retainer amount I would need to get started. She responds, "Well, I don't have that kind of money. When we win in court, you can have half the settlement."

In the state I live in, only lawyers can work on contingency, meaning payment is contingent on them winning the case. Investigators and all other people that might work for these lawyers still have to be paid no matter what. I tell the lady this. I thought she was about to explode. I tell her I can't break the law, but if she were to find a lawyer willing to take up her case, I could work for that lawyer as their private investigator.

She calms down and says thanks for hearing her out. I say no problem. I ask her if there was a family member she could call or a doctor she did trust that she could see. She tells me she's not crazy and storms out. I felt horrible for her, she was obviously living in terror and needed professional help. This was the first time I encountered someone seriously mentally ill.

Private investigatorsPexels

100. Who's That Girl

I used to work for an insurance defense firm. My favorite story is when we hired a PI to tail a guy who was suing our client for his injury that wasn't entirely our client's fault. The guy was refusing to settle and insisting on going to trial even though we offered a fair sum that would have covered his medical bills.

The PI took great pictures of the plaintiff that proved that he was nowhere near as injured as he had claimed—but that’s not even the best part. The crown jewel photo showed him walking on a pier feeling up a woman who was not his wife. So, during a later deposition, the attorney slid the picture to him and asked who she was to schedule her deposition.

The guy turned ghost white and then to his attorney. He decided that he was going to settle. He knew that if his wife found out about the other woman's deposition, he would have had to hire a family law attorney as well to deal with divorce papers.

Lawyers Accidentally Proved factsShutterstock

Sources: Reddit, , ,


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