Lessons From a Former PI

Working for a background check company intrigues people. Their imaginations run wild thinking about me doing stakeouts a la The Wire or old spy movies.

Photo by Pickled Stardust on Unsplash

They think I’m hiding out in my car, drinking stale coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, waiting for the person I’m following to appear as I take their picture.

In reality my entire job can be done behind a computer, no stakeouts necessary. For more lessons from my previous jobs check out this post.

Here are some lessons I’ve learned as a former investigator for a background check company.

Everyone Lies

This seems obvious but any time someone is trying to apply for a job they want to look their best. That includes bending the truth to suit their needs.

There are plenty of honest mistakes people can make like typos when they don’t double check what they wrote before hitting submit.

These are pretty easy to spot and people are very apologetic when we ask to confirm their name.

Then there are the people who lie about almost everything. Sometimes we would find things that no one else had found on them like warrants.

The easiest way to catch the pathological liars is right at the beginning of the report. When running a SSN trace you see all the names, addresses and DOB’s associated with this number.

Most people only have one or two names associated with their SSN sometimes their spouse or parent depending on how old they are. It’s a huge red flag when dozens of names pop up and none of them match the name provided.

Errors Are Everywhere

Even when we find a criminal case taking the extra steps to make sure this actually is the same person is extra important.

Anytime data is written down or transmitted from one person to another the potential for errors increases. This is why double checking everything is important. I can’t tell you how many times the court cases or records had errors.

This is why even data from the source needs to be double checked for errors. Countless times I’ve seen names misspelled, DOB’s transposed and switched digits in SSN’s.

Being detail oriented is a must in this work and even then you need to double check for errors all the time. If this type of work sounds exhausting then you’re bound to make a ton of mistakes.

Deception Tactics

For the pathological liars there are many ways they’ve found to deceive people who don’t do their due diligence and check the information provided.

A few common ones are pretending like you’ve changed your name after getting married so we won’t find the cases under your maiden name. Having multiple ID’s in different states and providing one that is invalid or expired.

We did pre employment background checks so many people were waiting on our results to start a new job. Understandably they wanted these completed as fast as possible.

We expect people to follow up once or twice if we ask for information. Usually we redirect them to their recruiter or company contact since we don’t make any hiring decisions. That’s the client’s job.

But it’s a huge red flag when they start pestering us constantly. That usually means they are hiding something and want to know if we found it yet. This could be anything from criminal cases, drug test results or lying about where they worked.

Lessons Learned From Former PI

Most people are telling the truth but when it comes to being hired for a job people like to stretch the truth. Some people know they won’t get hired without lying so they do it every time. The only way to find out is by doing a background check.