Deleting Your Digital Life

Be careful what you post on the internet, including social media sites, once it is up there your digital life is almost impossible to take down.

In some cases a digital life can haunt people, and even things that are just not true stay around forever. In 2085 your grandchildren might be reading things about you that were either just not true or you prefer remain private (just because something isn’t a secret, that doesn’t mean you want to share it with the whole world – your political persuasion, sexuality, religion, whatever).

People are only just starting to realise the implications of their digital life (footprint) and how it might come back to haunt them at some stage. We all do silly things that we regret, but now the internet can make it very difficult (the second after something is posted) to leave the past to the past.

When was the last time you read the small print on a social networking site, before telling the whole world all your personal details? No, me neither.

I recently read a story about a British woman who converted to Islam and wanted to delete her digital life. She tried to delete her Facebook website because she did not want others to discover how she had behaved in her youth.

In 2085 your grandchildren might be reading things about you that were either just not true or you prefer remain private (just because something isn’t a secret, that doesn’t mean you want to share it with the whole world – your political persuasion, sexuality, religion, whatever).

She said: “Facebook makes it very difficult (to delete history), it takes far too long to delete each individual post on your Facebook page. Weeks later and I’ve managed it. After I left my model agency they deleted my profile, but photos of myself are still online on photographers’ websites.

“They own the photos so there’s nothing I can do except hope nobody searches my name and sees past the extravagant makeup to see it’s me.

“People are perhaps naive about their actions. You can no longer do something stupid and hope nobody notices, it WILL be on Facebook! And it might be funny now but 10 years later maybe not.”

So How Can You Vanish Your Digital Life from the Internet?

Cleaning away your digital life means getting rid of the traces you’ve left across the world wide web aE” the mistakes you made, the embarrassing photos, the unwise/insulting/stupid comments yu made (perhaps when you had a little too much to drink), the terrible social media profiles you made without thinking them through properly where you’ve left too much visible.

It is certainly not easy. The following steps provide a start to reducing your digital life and footprint and taking back control of your online life.

1) If you have a Facebook account, change every setting in the  Privacy  tabs to “private” or “not shared” or “off” (there’s a special “privacy settings” shortcut in the blue bar near the top).

2) Find out what photos you’re tagged in on Facebook. These should appear in the Photos tab on the left hand side. If you hover over the picture, a star and a pencil appear in the top right. Choose “Report/remove tag” and pick “I want to untag myself” from the list.

3) If you have a Google Blogger account, delete your profile there. That means that blogposts or comments you’ve made there will vanish.

4) If you’ve got a Tumblr or WordPress blog, delete that too.

Now start using a search engine, and begin searching on your name (put the first name and surname together in quotes; this works in pretty much all search engines to identify that as a phrase you’re after). Note that some sites, such as newspapers, generally won’t agree to removing your name if you’ve appeared in a news or other story.

5) If you’ve posted in forums, go back and see if you can delete your posts.

If you can’t, try asking the administrators of the sites (nicely) if they can remove your post.

Make sure you prepare a very good reason why you want something removed.

6) Remove any photos you’ve added to sites such as Flickr or, of course, Facebook. Try searching on your name in Google Images (put quotes around your name) and see what comes up: then visit those sites and ask if they would remove the photos.

7) Keep doing searches on your name and finding out what turns up, and getting in touch with the owners of the sites. Be prepared to get rebuffed, especially if the site is in the US.

8) Be aware that anything that you’ve posted outside Facebook, Blogger or WordPress might still live on in the  Internet Archive . This archive which aims to crawl the entire web again and again and store what it finds, for ever. The Internet Archive doesn’t have an explicit way to remove sites once they’re in its index aE” which is absolutely huge. It does take a case-by-case approach to requests for removal.

9) Be aware too that even if you remove explicit mentions of your name, a determined searcher may be able to dig up your past through leftover postings and hints of whatever sort. Mentions by other people, photos where even though you’re not tagged, you’re mentioned in related information.

In this, we’ve not taken the more extensive move of deleting your Google web search history. If you don’t want to be (silently) tracked by Google, then stop using Google’s search (there are plenty of other search engines that won’t track you, such as DuckDuckGo.com or Blekko.com. DuckDuckGo is improving all the time, and saw a  big jump in traffic  with the change in Google’s privacy policies last year.

Vanishing your digital life from the internet is very, very hard. As far as is known, nobody’s succeeded but of course if they had, how would we know?

Indonesia Private Investigation Agency  (IPIA) along with our sister agency  Bali Eye Private Investigation Agency  (BEPIA) are  fully registered Private Investigation Agencies offering private detective and private investigator services to the Private and Business sectors throughout Indonesia and South East Asia.

The post I Want to Vanish appeared first on Indonesia Private Investigation Agency.

Mata Hari

Honey traps are hundreds of years old. One of the best known recent traps in spy history is by “Mata Hari” (also called “the most dangerous spy of all time”), a Dutch woman who had spent some years as an erotic dancer in Java. She died by firing squad on Oct. 15, 1917 after being convicted of spying.

The French arrested her on charges of spying for the Germans during World War I. They claimed that the German was her control officer and she was passing French secrets to him, secrets she had obtained by seducing prominent French politicians and officers.

Chinese Espioange

Even today the English MI5 recently expressed its concerns about sex and honey traps to gain business knowledge.

In a 14-page document distributed to hundreds of financial institutions and titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” the MI5 described a Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships through honey traps.

The document warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”

This latest report on Chinese corporate espionage tactics is only the most recent installment in a long and sordid history of spies and sex. For millennia, spymasters of all sorts have trained their spies to use art of love and sex to obtain secret information.

Homesexual Honey Traps

A Honey Trap though is not always heterosexual.

Jeremy Wolfenden gay and worked as a British journalist in Moscow in the early 1960s at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

Seizing its opportunity, the KGB ordered the Ministry of Foreign Trade’s male hair-dresser to seduce him and put a man with a camera in Wolfenden’s closet to take photos. The KGB then blackmailed Wolfenden, threatening to pass on the photographs to his employer if he did not spy on the Western community in Moscow.

Wolfenden reported the incident to the British Embassy, but he was called to see an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) who asked him to work as a double agent, leading the KGB along but continuing to report back to SIS.

The stress led Wolfenden into alcoholism and his life fell into a haze of heavy drinking before he died aged 31.

The Private Investigator and the Honey Trap

Indonesia Private Investigation Agency and BEPIA have been involved with setting Honey Traps for clients. Its not just women who approach IPIA/BEPIA about honey-trapping -  our client ratio is around 60% women to 40% men.

For the Private Investigator a ‘honey trap’ is basically an investigation that involves someone being paid to flirt with a target to detect signs of infidelity. Usually a Honey Trap is a simple case of approaching the target in a bar to see how far they want to take things sexually.

Honey-trap cases may seem simple from the outside but they often require the most planning. Clients want an answer and IPIA/BEPIA’s aim is to get that answer for them. However before we start a case, we  always make sure that clients realise just what they’re getting into and are able to prepare themselves for the worst possible outcome.

For every honey trap IPIA/BEPIA use at least two agents. One with the target and the other acting as a security back-up.

IPIA/BEPIA set up a wire on the agent with the target to hear the conversation. We also have special coded body language signals to communicate with the security agent.

If things get a little too close, for example if a man attempts to kiss an agent, the agent will make some excuse to rush off. Security for the IPIA/BEPIA agents is always a top priority.

The post A Bitter Taste of Honey appeared first on Indonesia Private Investigation Agency.

This is a true case IPIA and BEPIA solved recently tracking and catching an embezzler. We have changed the names, places and dates to protect confidentiality.

Modern technologies are incredibly useful for a Private Investigator in Indonesia but at the end of the day it is the old fashioned leg work and the thrilling chase that closes a case.

Background

In early February we had a call from someone in Jakarta. We will call him Fred. Fred was extremely worried for his wife, Jane, as she was likely to go to prison although she was innocent and a victim of a set up.

Jane worked in the finance department in a large company in Jakarta.

In the same company there was another senior financial officer, Steve, working as a freelance auditor.

From 2010 Steve started to ask money from Jane. The reasons he gave were all related to the company’s tax payments. Jane, being young and naive, believed her senior partner after assurances that it would be fine to skip the usual financial controlling systems.

In late 2012 the company’s Director checked their tax status and found taxes had not been paid since 2010. The amount had accumulated to around 5 billion IDR ($500,000).

Jane was asked for her explanation and showed all the transfer scripts she had from Steve.

The Target

Fred had called Indonesia Private Investigation Agency (IPIA) to track and find Steve, the embezzler, who had disappeared.

We asked Fred to give us three weeks to complete the case.

Tracking the Embezzler 

IPIA’s first task was to find out the target’s location. All we really had to go on was a telephone number, and a date of birth (because Steve was freelance, or perhaps they had other reasons the company did not want to co-operate).

Officially SIM cards in Indonesia must be registered with a valid ID, or for foreigners a passport. This system was introduced as a security measure especially in light of terrorist threats.

In reality though in Indonesia you can buy a SIM card from any small shop and they will activate the card for you using their own details. So a track on a registered user will not always get you a traget’s details.

Our luck was in. It turned out Steve had registered “correctly” (not a very smart embezzler mind) and he was registered as having an address in Bandung (about three hours from Jakarta).

The IPIA team made their way to the house. However it was his ex-wife’s house and they don’t have any contact with Steve anymore (or so they said).

We did though learn that Steve had a mother who was sick and his ex-wife gave us the address (so we guess she was not lying when she said she had had no contact with Steve).

Four days we waited for Steve. He just did not show.

The Trace and Chase

If a telephone number is active and switched on IPIA can track the location within a 200 meter radius.

We had been trying for a few days but the phone was always off.

Then Steve appeared on our radar system, blinking away in Bali.

The chase was on, but like any good hunter knows a great deal of patience is needed.

Within three hours we had the Director of Investigations travelled from Jakarta to Bali and met up with our sister agency Bali Eye Private Investigation Agency (BEPIA).

You can imagine how many houses there are in a built up area of a 200-meter radius. So with both IPIA and BEPIA working together we canvassed the area for three days. He was still blinking away on our radar but we could not find him.

Then out of the blue a trace shows him back in Jakarta.

Any fisherman knows the feeling when you are close to a catch but the fish gets away. But still almost two weeks had passed by and despite the loss we were still confident of catching the embezzler.

Perseverance and perseverance. And that brings its own luck. So off we went back to Jakarta and started the canvassing there.

Not again? Yes two days later Steve appeared back in Bali.

But IPIA has not just been running around like a headless chicken following telephone  tracks. We had other investigators doing more background research and with help from some financial consultants we finally got a solid lead: Steve has a wife in Bali and we now knew his address there.

The Hook Is In

I called in to BEPIA and got them at the address immediately. They had a picture and description and they were on standby surveillance whilst I came back to Bali.

After two days we saw him and got a nice crisp photo that we sent to our client Fred for confirmation. We confirmed his means of transportation (cars and motorbikes etc.) and stayed still waiting.

Fred took the next flight to Bali. I met him (of course one team was with the embezzler the whole time).

He had taken the first flight to Bali and when we meet him I sat for a while in an airport cafe to discuss the next steps.

As we sat there a BEPIA agent called me and said Steve and his wife were on the move. Fred and I went straight to their house and saw their car on the road.

I followed them with two car covers between my car and theirs. This close finally after all this time the heart beats. This is when the chase really makes me love my job. The thrill is in the chasing and not the apprehension, the pursuit you see and never the arrest. Not that the capture does not give me a great buzz and sense of satisfaction, but the nervousness comes with the chase.

Steve and his wife were moving towards the airport. This suspicion was strengthened by my BEPIA colleague telling me they had two small bags with them (not shopping bags).

The Net Closes

I never let Fred know but at this stage I was a little bit panicked.

I was weighing up what I needed to do when they arrived at the airport. I knew I had to ask police to help at this stage.

IPIA/BEPIA have a close relationship with the police and I had already had dinner with one contact a few days before to brief them just in case help was needed. I called my contact and asked if he could meet us at the airport.

As Steve pulled near the departure parking I pulled my car next to his.

My police contacts were there to meet us and we landed the target.

I actually thought I might get a round of applause from the whole airport, but no-one of course knew what was happening or what we had been through. It was all done very quietly and the big embezzler was like a shuttling little timid mouse in a corner, and off he was taken to the airport’s police station.

A few hours later the police had the proof they needed as Steve confessed looking tired and scared (if he had lawyered up he probably would have been able to walk free).

Fred did not want to take him to court (and what the company finally did with Steve he was not that concerned with). All he wanted was protection for his wife and a written statement from Steve admitting that he was had taken and was using the company’s money for his own sake.

The post Tracking, Hunting and Catching an Embezzler appeared first on Indonesia Private Investigation Agency.

Indonesia Private Investigation Agency (IPIA) and Bali Eye Private Investigation Agency are seeing more cases of dating cons in Indonesia. Foreigners (especially men) and weak law enforcement are creating an environment in which scammers can operate with very little risk.

Nowadays with the internet and all that brings such as Yahoo Messenger, Skype, WhatsApp and many more social media sites make it possible for anyone to find and develop a relationship with a person on the other side of the world.

It is sad that whilst most of the people who date online act sincerely, and intense and real feeling do develop, these conditions drag the unscrupulous con artists from the gutters. These scam artists have seemed to make it their intention to take money from online victims.

In this article, we will give a brief overview of some of the kinds of dating scams IPIA has come across, how to recognize them, and what to do if you think you are a victim of a dating scam.

So what is a dating con and who are the scammers?

Dating scammers usually fall into one of three categories:

An individual/couple

This is usually a female on the face of it who dates several people at the same time, collecting money and gifts from each. These individuals sometimes live with husbands or boyfriends, who help the girl with the scam.

A translation service

This is set up to as a kind of control centre, looking at every interaction with the person they are translating for. Services like these seem to offer great assistance, but in reality they often act as more of a matchmaker, and paid a large amount of money when their client receives a proposal for marriage and another large sum of money upon emigration to the US or other destination country.

A group of con artists

This is really a long sting operation and very dangerous (or rather costly) for the victim. The team try and slowly and systematically draw the victim in.

Their intention is to make the victim (him or her) fall in love and then impose ever-increasing demands.

They may ask to pay a dowry to “parents”, buy them a house, help with hospital bills (for a mother for example), invest in a house for the girlfriend.

and victim to share or otherwise part with small and large amount of money.

Examples of dating scams:

As a private investigation firm, IPIA has handled many cases involving dating scams.

We always keep all details of our investigations completely confidential.

As illustration we obtained permission from two of our former clients to summarize the facts of their cases below. We have changed (or not revealed) locations or other identifiable details, but these are actual cases to serve as examples.

Foreign Girlfriend Held Hostage in Indonesia

In this case, the client contacted us to help him assist his girlfriend in Indonesia. He told IPIA he had been chatting online with his girlfriend for a few years, but that she had traveled to a certain city in Indonesia (she did not speak Indonesian) and was now being held hostage by unknown people in this city. She was able to get to the phone occasionally to quickly our client and ask for help, but was otherwise unreachable.

We gathered additional information from the client and learned that with the exception of a few phone calls, his contact with his girlfriend had been entirely through text messages and email. He had been sending her hundreds of dollars every two weeks for the previous year or more. His girlfriend had told him that her parents lived in Africa and the client had therefore sent the money to a man in Africa all that time. When the client provided photos sent to him by his girlfriend, they turned out to be professionally taken modeling photos of a beautiful blonde girl in her early 20s.

We did a quick check of some of the emails and found that they came from Africa, not from the Indonesian city, from which the girlfriend supposedly sent them.

At that point, we advised the client that he did not need to hire us, that the girlfriend probably did not exist. We asked that he give his girlfriend our phone number and ask her to call us aE” that he had given us the money he normally sent to her (of course he had not really) and that we would help her, get her the money and help her leave Indonesia.

She never called IPIA and the client was finally convinced. He had been paying a Nigerian con-man hundreds of dollars for two years. We warned our client that the con-man could try and start using his financial information to steal whatever money he could, now that he knew the he had been found out.

Girlfriend and Man Buy a House Together

This situation is a very common story in Indonesia. There are a few variables but the essence is more or less the same.

The man meets a girl online, travels to her city to meet her and meets her parents. He stays in a hotel for a while before returning to his home country.

The girl now convinces the client to invest in a house in her city and some months later, he returns to visit her, along with cash. On the outside it all looks legitimate as they go with a translator to the real estate sales office and fill out the sales contract in both of their names.

Both sign and all documents are officially stamped. The man pays cash to the property sales person and is given a receipt. The girl keeps the documents, as they need to stay in that country. He returns home, but finds that she is less and less communicative. When she breaks off contact, he hires IPIA.

He has videotape of his visit to purchase the property, along with all parties on tape. We find out that the sales person on the tape were not an employee of their company and that the purchase documents were filed in her name only, with no mention of the client. The girlfriend had since sold the property.

IPIA tracked down the girlfriend and gave her a chance to make things right with the client, or be arrested. She re-opened communication with him, crying and telling him that she was forced to trick him by mysterious unknown parties (a common theme) and begged his forgiveness. Against our recommendation, the client decided to let it go and trust her again (another strange phenomenon, which is not uncommon). She kept up the communication for just long enough to disappear again (with the money of course).

Our client had some legal claims against the real estate development company, where the contract was signed, but the client decides not to pursue that possible remedy. He has not heard from his former fiancee since.

Here are some warning signs.

• emergencies and sudden illness that pop up early and often;
• claims of love that seem just too quick;
• requests for financial assistance;
• photographs that look like they were taken by a professional or copied from the internet. You can check the names of the files to see if they have the same file name structure. Real photos will also usually be larger in size (mb);
• problems with visa or passport that require your assistance;
• problems with people threatening them – translator, bill collector, some other thug;
• inability to reach the person (phone doesn’t work or too expensive, phone always turned off);
• communication only through email and messaging;
• rigid time schedule for contact;
• use of a translation service;
• unwarranted interest in financial information – social security (identity) number, mother’s maiden name, etc.

What should you do if you are a victim of a dating con?

Some scammers are interested in more than just gifts and money from the victim. These scammers will gather information during the “relationship” and use that information to hack credit card and bank accounts and even steal the victim’s identity.

Before confronting the scammer, you should first make a list of what information they have about you. Do they have your social security number and date of birth from an immigration form? Do they have your mother’s maiden name from a conversation? Do they have your banking information from a wire transfer?

First, secure your personal information. Change your passwords. Call your bank and tell them about your fears and as them to put an extra level of security on your account. Get an instant online credit report from all credit bureaus. Confirm that no new accounts have been opened and then have the bureaus flag your credit file, so that you receive a call when new account requests are made.

Now you are ready to confront the scammer. You may want to pursue legal action against them and/or recover valuables if any have been stolen. IPIA can help with that. Talk to us about what information you have about them and we will fill in the blanks and bring them to justice.

The post Dating Cons in Indonesia appeared first on Indonesia Private Investigation Agency.

In our last post (Facebook: The PI Friend) we already covered how useful Facebook and other social media sites can be great private investigation toosl not only for a Private Investigator but for anyone wanting to carry out their own private investigations.

Most people probably think of state of the art spy tools when they think of private investigation tools. This is true to some extent - IPIA (and our sister agency BEPIA) uses advanced cameras and recording equipment, bionic ear dishes and portable voice changers. We also have access to forensic laboratories

The foundation of our work though is really built on tools that are common and available from many places (if not free) and not just specialised shops. Without these tools it would be difficult to operate.

Five Private Investigation Tools Anyone Can Use

Advanced Google Searches

You can find almost anything on the web, and therefore Google may seem like an obvious choice  as a private investigation tool considering it is by far the most popular search engine out there.

Similar though to IPIA’s post on Facebook as a private investigation tool (Facebook: The PI Friend) not too many people know how to take full advantage of the advanced capabilities of Google.

For example the “Around” feature will search for two terms within a specific number of words near each other, the “site” operator will search a specific website for terms and the “-” (minus sign) operator will exclude a term.  These are  just a few of many advanced search operators that you can use with Google.

Skype

Skype of course is good for free skype to skype calling, very cheap international calls and video conferencing where you can have a video chat with many people.

Additionally, Skype as a private investigation tool, has various third party add-on’s, one of the best is the ability to record phone calls.  IPIA uses different free add-on applications that can turn any conversation into a MP3 recording.  Be careful here though – you could be breaking the law if you try this yourself. Laws vary in different countries with regards to recording phone calls.

Digital Scanner

This may be an off the shelf   as a private investigation tool but it is not that cheap. Still it is openly accessible to anyone. Having the ability to scan hundreds of pages of documents in a matter of minutes used to be the kind of stuff you would see in James Bond movies, but not anymore.  Scanning hundreds, if not thousands of pages of documents into searchable digital files, can save hours of  looking over paper documents.  IPIA uses the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500; it’s portable, scans both sides of the page in one pass and it’s fast and reliable.

PDF Converter and OCR Software

Converting documents into PDF compatible files can be very useful.  In Indonesia in particular most cases produce lots and lots of paper. Therefore having the ability to store digital files into a searchable format can be a huge timesaver and can help you find documents quickly and easily.  IPIA uses the Adobe Acrobat Standard, which is reliable and very functional, despite a hefty price tag.

Google Desktop

Having hundreds (if not thousands) of digital files can be a problem if you don’t know where they are.  Google Desktop constantly scans your hard drive, Internet history and your emails so you will never “lose” anything ever again.

The post Five Private Investigation Tools Anyone Can Use appeared first on Indonesia Private Investigation Agency.

Facebook can be a very good friend to a Private Investigator or anyone that wants to do their own investigations IF you know a couple of  tricks.

It took our private investigators quite while to work out how to really squeeze Facebook.  Perhaps you are like me – at first I just could not find people.

Well it was easy enough to find people I was not looking for. BUT the problem with Facebook is there are many many privacy settings.

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, all the new social media sites, are  playing a bigger and bigger  role for private investigators, and there is no bigger site around at the moment  than Facebook.

With 800 million active Facebook users, it’s more common for someone to be on Facebook than not. Social media sites such as Facebook offer a massive amount of information that might be relevant to any investigation including an asset investigation, a business background check or to find someone on the Internet.

As i said one of the big challenges to finding somebody on Facebook is all the privacy settings that people use so that they can not be found. But there are ways around that, which we will go into below.

Here are four ways to find somebody on Facebook:

Facebook Search

The obvious place to start is Facebook’s own search feature. Here you can search by the person’s name, school or company. You must have an active account in order to access this feature. In order to find the person on Facebook, the person you are looking must not have their privacy settings turned on so that the person can be looked up by name or contact info.

Email Address

For most social networks, Facebook included, you can find somebody by typing in an email address. So even if a user profile has been set up under a completely false name, you can still find the person by typing his or her email address into the Facebook search engine.

Site Operator

The big secret about Facebook that perhaps not everyone knows is that even if privacy settings are set any comments a person makes become public.

So what you can do is use the site operator in Google. This will search all pages that have been indexed by Google. If you include site: in your query, Google will restrict your search results to the site or domain you specify.

So, for example, lets say you are looking for were looking for the Tom Cruise, you would type “site:www.facebook.com Tom Cruise.”

Search Friends, Family and Colleagues

You can of course control your own privacy settings, but not other people’s. Facebook even has its own family search, where you can search by family last name. If friends, family or colleagues don’t change some privacy settings, you may be able to find the person by looking through the friend lists of friends, colleagues, family and coworkers.

So What Next?

If you have found the person’s profile, well done.

But the person may have set their privacy settings so you can not look at the person’s wall or pictures.

Don’t give up. We have found that people often leave their friend lists open, which can help you find other information.

The post Facebook: A Friend of a Private Investigator appeared first on Indonesia Private Investigation Agency.

Our private investigator teams in  IPIA  and  BEPIA  are often contacted by  men who have been victims of dating scams.  Often the scammers pretend to be single women and entice the man into a relationship and eventually milk as much money from him as they can before disappearing.

How do you defend against Con Artists?

Our private investigators will always advise that you do not settle for communication by email, phone and text pages only. Insist on video chat. These are commonly used in Indonesia and if the girl or woman in question does not know how to use it, someone she knows will and can help her.

• When you are video chatting with her, call at the same time, so that you can confirm it is the same person, who answers the telephone. Talk to her on the phone and ask her to wave to you on the video connection.
• Do not send money via Western Union. Send it via bank wire transfer.
• Look for inconsistencies in the supplied documents. For instance a birth year that does not match the approximate age of the person.

What can  IPIA/BEPIA  do to help?

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Often you may have a gut feeling that you have a cheating partner; and that leads to a burning desire to find out if you are right or wrong.

After talking with  several private investigators, and after working on over 200 suspected cheating partner related cases  BEPIA  offers this brief summary of the top ten clues to tell if s/he is a cheating partner.

Number Ten:

Your partner is paying more attention to the way he or she dresses. Maybe s/he is changing styles, buying new clothes, working out.

It may be a mid-life crisis. They may just have decided to change the way they look as it makes them feel happier.

But be careful, such actions are often a sign someone is cheating. Getting all dressed up and working out may be for   someone new.

Number Nine:

Your partner is taking more money from the bank and spending more than usual, but they never have anything to show for it.

There could of course be many reasons aE” a gambling habit, an illness in the family that your partner has not told you about.

Remember though having an affair, hotel rooms, dinners out, weekends away, is not cheap.

Number Eight:

There’s a change in your sex life … there might be less or more.

But often what waves the red flag is when your partner wants to try out new things.

Number Seven:

Has there been a change in the way you communicate with each other?

Sometimes a cheating partner may start a fight on purpose so s/he can leave the house – a good excuse to go and meet the other person.

Number Six:

Work: Your partner is working a lot of sudden overtime but you can never reach them on the phone.

Number Five:

Your partner is always going out for work meetings, but every time you try to reach him or her they are is not where they are supposed to be. This could be a good reason to be suspicious.

Number Four:

Remember when your partner used to be happy and relaxed, enjoying time with you and/or the family?

This contentment has been replaced with restlessness and a desire to be anywhere except with the family.

Number Three:

Your partner starts to pick more of your faults out.

A cheating partner does have a conscience and finding fault with you can be a way for your partner for justifying the cheating.

Number Two:

This is the opposite of finding faults aE” being even more loving towards you.

This is usually at the start of the infidelity, and a way for the cheating partner to ease their guilt.

Number One:

The phone … when your partner is on the phone and you enter the room all of a sudden your partner lowers his or her voice or even leaves the room to finish the conversation.

Maybe the phone has a passcode and your partner refuses to share the code.

If you do get into the phone you notice that all the call histories and SMS messages have been deleted.

This could be someone covering their tracks.

So what do you do if all the evidence points to what you feared the most?

Even though the truth is painful it can be better than to live with a lie.

Our suggestion is as a first step you talk to your partner, and try and get the truth that way. At that point you can decide to work it out, maybe by talking to a counsellor, or you can decide to end the relationship.

Indonesia Private Investigation Agency (IPIA) along with our sister agency Bali Eye Private Investigation Agency (BEPIA) are fully registered Private Investigation Agencies offering private detective and private investigator services to the Private and Business sectors throughout Indonesia and South East Asia.

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No. It is not a title of the great book Life of Pi. It’s Life as a PI – a Private Investigator. As we know, the first and probably the founding father of the private investigation agency and detective services in Indonesia is BEPIA - Bali Eye Private Investigation Agency.

BEPIA then soon opened IPIA - Indonesia Private Investigation Agency. BEPIA or IPIA were the first and probably the founding fathers of private investigation agencies and detective services in Indonesia.

Before I joined I kept asking myself  where do they get their workers? Who could be a private investigator and/or a detective? Should they be majoring in something special like criminology?  What special skills do they have?

These questions stuck in my head.

IPIA and BEPIA have agents with degrese in Criminology or with police backgrounds but formal qualifications aside there are some major characteristics one must have to become a professional private investigator or detective.

• Intuition
• Patience
• Dedication
• Loyalty
• Communicating skills
• Data processing abilities
• Knowledge of law

If you want to be the man on the field such as working on a surveillance, you better have a great intuition and patience (you try sitting in a car for 10 hours). If you want to work behind the desk, you better be good with data processing, have a wide knowledge of law, and also great communication skills as you will interact with lots of clients from different backgrounds.

Above all, the most important point is dedication, patience and loyalty. A great dedication and patience to finish your job.  To do it great and get an excellence result. A huge loyalty is needed in being a private investigator or a detective as you will be keeping someone’s secrets. Huge secrets.

IPIA works on cases with the utmost professionalism and dedication, the CEO who is also the Director of Investigations holds an international qualification in Private Investigation.

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Bali goes by a number of titles – the Island of the Gods, the Island of a Thousand Temples, and more recently the World Peace Committee decided to bestow yet another title: the Island of Peace.

Bali has a local population of around 3.9 million, tourist figures hover around 2.5 million annually and it is also home to 30,000 or so expatriate residents (these are just the legal ones), but I guess few would guess another title Indonesian PIs might justifiably offer up – the Island of Runaways.

Indonesia in general, and perhaps Bali in particular, is one of those havens that people who want to disappear go to.

Indonesia Private Investigation Agency has had clients who firstly “simply” need to know if someone has arrived in Bali or Indonesia. The targets have their own reasons for wanting to fade away – trying to get longer away than the long arm of the law (I need to find them and serve them papers), a spouse that has run away with the children or simply just left their partner, and parent with children looking for reconcilliation, or a teenager who for some reason has “gone”.

We had one client who was pretty sure their spouse was planning on coming to Bali with their two children – an action that went against a court injunction relating to the children’s custody. The client did not know when exactly, nor the route their partner was planning.

Task 1

See if the runaway was in Bali.

Task 2

Clients that need to know if someone is in Bali or Indonesia think our private investigators in Jakarta or Bali can just go down to immigration and ask them to click a few keys on a computer and within a couple of minutes a centralised computer system will tell us when they arrived and through which port they landed in. If only it was that simple. This is Indonesia with over 17,500 islands and 44 different ports of entry (by sea, land or air).

As we explain to all our clients in this kind of situation the obstacle basically is that immigration records are neither centralised nor computerized.

For sake of illustration let’s call this client’s spouse “J”. It would be a nice start to the two tasks if J had flown directly into Bali and registered through immigration there. But before going to Bali J might have fancied visiting the 9th-century Buddhist monument in Borobudur Central Java, or taking the children to see the Oranghutans in Borneo. J could have entered through any of the other 43 ports besides Bali and then travelled internally to the Island of the Gods.

As I said the immigration records are not centralised so if J did enter lets say though Jakarta she would not show up in the Bali immigration records through a click or two on a computer in Bali.

This ia a big problem for our private investigators – paper, paper and more paper. Stacks of it in filing cabinets and then piled up on top of them because the cabinets are full.

J’s spouse gave me a two week window to check for the runaway’s arrival. Let’s say J did land directly in Bali and go though immigration there. With 2.5 million tourists and almost 20,000 international flights landing in Bali every year you’ll get the picture of the paper generated over a two week period, and another issue – the potential for human error.

This lack of centralization and massive paper load is not confined to immigration. Indonesia Private Investigation and Bali Eye have worked for clients on hotel registrations given to police and with the registrar of births and deaths for various reasons. The numbers are by no means as massive as the traffic going through Bali immigration but the essential difficulties remain.

When i told my client that J had not appeared on the immigration records he looked at me as if our private investigators were an abject failure, as if in someway my investigators had not done their job properly. The client was almost certain the spouse was in Bali so why were her records not showing up?

Eventually I found J through hotel records (the arrival into Bali had indeed been via another immigration port). Before finding her my client was kind enough to give me a tidy tip when he realized I had indeed pulled out all the stops with immigration: to show him just how antiquated the record keeping systems are, and to calm him down, I took him to immigration to see for himself how things operate and what needed to be done. I wish I had a picture of his face when he was confronted with the Great Wall of Paper for the first time. I guess if he had seen an alien from another planet his expression would not have been that different, and I can’t repeat all the expletives here. Suffice to say he had just never imagined it could be that way and he understood.

Indonesia Private Investigation Agency (IPIA) along with our sister agency Bali Eye Private Investigation Agency (BEPIA) are fully registered Private Investigation Agencies offering private detective and investigation services to the Private and Business sectors throughout Indonesia and South East Asia.

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