Postal Address
PO Box 17
Pavilion
DURBAN
South Africa
3611

Telephone
+27 (0) 31 2671212

Fax
+ 27 (0) 86 5168722

Email
fohladbn@yebo.co.za

Website
www.fohlasecurity.co.za

PSIRA Reg Number
1144490
 

Private/Forensic Investigators - Debtor & 3rd Party Tracers - Risk Auditors
CCTV & Access Control Systems, Computers, Networking & related Electronics
Specialist criminal & civil litigation, commercial/white collar crime, business intelligence/due diligence
and missing persons investigators.

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Jardine's "Investigator's Diary - 15 February 2009
My involvement this past weekend in the recovery of a child "abducted" by the non-custodial parent reminds me of the extent that technology has re-defined investigation methods. Using newly acquired technology that enables FSG to track and locate a cellphone in real-time, 24/7,  I had a location on the non-custodial parent within minutes of receiving instructions.
       I recall one of the first cases I took on as a novice PI back in the mid eighties. This drop-dead gorgeous woman walked into my office and informed that she wanted confirmation that her lover was no longer enjoying conjugal relations with his wife. Her lover, who was also her boss, had promised he would divorce his wife and claimed that he no longer shared her bed. Could I not, she asked, install a listening device in their bedroom? Girlfriend had a set of keys to the home and lover and family all went to church on Sunday mornings. Naturally, her seductive, girl-innocent smile had nothing to with my acceptance of the instruction, but listening device installed, I returned on Sunday evening and set up surveillance 50 meters from the targeted home. (50 meters was about the maximum reliable range of the commercial FM band transmission bugging devices that were available.)
Surveillance, especially the static variety, is dead-boring. I deal with it by making like a cash register and mentally ringing up my fee as each hour passes.
       There I was, merrily minding someone else's business while trying to occupy my bored mind when a figure suddenly pops up in front of my car and empties his firearm into my windscreen! I'm sure I must have thought something like, "Oh dear. How rude" before I was able to gather enough of my terrified wits to turn on the ignition and hightail it out of there, driving with only one eye peering over the dashboard while patting down my body for inexplicably absent bullet holes!
       The point is that there is often no substitute for surveillance in the investigative process. The further point is that surveillance is a science. An extended period of successful surveillance requires that the surveyor is never in the field of vision of the subject of surveillance.  This requires the deployment of significant resources; multiple surveyors, multiple vehicles, audiovisual and communications equipment - and the co-ordination of these resources.        Consequently any surveillance exercise is expensive. FSG, for example, currently charges R395.00/hour per surveillance operative simultaneously deployed to a surveillance task.
        But this is about to change. As long as the subject of surveillance has a cellphone that it is switched on, our newly acquired real-time cellphone tracking technology means we can deploy a one person-one vehicle surveillance resource that can afford to lose sight of the target for periods of time because we only have to poll the location of a cellphone to recommence the surveillance. Access to the technology is easy and inexpensive. There is no setup cost, no subscription fee and no costly software. All client has to do is provide is a cellphone number and we will return a location, depicted in a street map and providing GPS co-ordinates - and all it costs is R250.00 per location poll.
       There are numerous applications for legal practitioners. One application will be of interest to legal practitioners with a debt recovery practice. Think of savvy, evasive and shielded debtors. Until now, the only option has been to employ an investigator to profile the debtor's movements until there is sufficient evidence to place the debtor and the Sheriff in the same place at the same time ("point outs"). Now, a few strategically timed cellphone location polls (eg. 08h30 and 23h30) to establish where the debtor habitually sleeps/works will get the job done quickly and cost effectively. 
Another application are divorce actions, where infidelity is suspected but the details are unknown.
 

Jardine's "Investigator's Diary" - 9 November 2008 
Years ago a Swiss businessman contacted me through our website. He wanted us to find his daughter, who he had last seen in London on the day of her birth almost eighteen years ago. All we had to work with was the mother’s name and the fact that she was originally from South Africa. His goal was to introduce himself to his daughter on her eighteenth birthday and to present her with the gifts he had bought over the years for each of her birthdays. We eventually found both mother and daughter in a small KZN north coast town. Mom turned out to be a decent sort, and with her assistance we were both present when father and daughter embraced for the first time on her eighteenth birthday. I cried.
          Recently I was tasked to locate a woman who was the beneficiary of her estranged grandmother’s substantial estate. Granny had severed all ties with her family decades earlier (and, as it turned out, all components of the family were estranged from one another.) Not even a single name for any of her relatives could be found in deceased’s possessions. Her Will provided only the name - and an incorrect date of birth – for her granddaughter. Our search took us through four African countries before we finally located the granddaughter in Dubai; married, recently unemployed
and about to give birth to her third child.
It is a rare thing that my work results in moments of pure, life-changing joy. But when it does, I am reminded why I love what I do. It is just enough to sustain the notion that financial reward is sufficient sustenance for the enthusiasm required to deal with the daily plethora of fraudsters, thieves, liar’s, murders (yes, those too) and general anal cavities that are otherwise the subject of my life’s work.

 Jardine's "Investigator's Diary" - 17 October 2008
It does not require any special skill to follow an investigation trail. While expertise and experience are advantageous if the subject matter of the investigation is complex - and an understanding of the “rules of evidence” is always a pre-requisite - the dynamic of pursuing an investigation trail remains essentially the same - one bit of information reveals the location of the next, and so on. The extent of investigative skill finds expression when the known facts have no value for/provide no assistance to the objectives of an investigation - when all the avenues of investigation that present prove to be dead-ends.
A distinction must be made between creating leads/evidence and manufacturing leads/evidence. The skilled investigator is one who can create leads/evidence when confronted by dead-ends. The task is one that requires study of the subject matter of the investigation and a mental exercise to extrapolate all leads/evidence that theoretically could present in respect of the subject of the investigation.
Investigative skill is a combination of experience and the ability to think both deductively and inductively.
I like to refer to it as the difference between joining the dots and finding the dots to be joined. I have always found that while I can teach deductive logical skills, inductive logical skills are more innate than they are acquired.