entertainment

21 Private Investigators Reveal The Most Insane Task They’ve Been Assigned To

14.

A college friend of mine was a PI. He said 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 serve people, including disguises, high pressure tactics and weird social engineering. He’s out of it now because he’d had too many close calls. Serving divorce papers or notices of being sued where you have no idea of the state of mind of the person you’re serving to could get interesting to say the least.

15.

I did surveillance for insurance fraud/workers comp cases for a short time. We would usually just be assigned to someone for a couple of days, unless we found something that warranted more time. On my first day watching this guy he leaves his house about 7 hours into the 8 hour (for me) day. I follow him out of the neighborhood, out of the town onto the highway, still on the highway, into the metro area, into downtown (oh shit where is this guy going to?) and 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 the car over to the valet. 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.

16.

It was one of my last cases that I worked on. It was for a child custody/paternity case.This case was the one that made me rethink what I was doing and I got very disturbed by what I was asked to do. This is the case that made me stop being a PI. 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 on the case for us to make sure there was evidence to support his claim. The icing on the “shit cake” was when my case manager told me that client wanted video evidence 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 9 year old. I couldn’t have 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.

17.

I got hired to follow another investigator who, turns out, was hired to follow me.

Written by Laura McNairy

Laura is a freelance writer for TFLN. She likes to write about what she knows best — dating, sex, and being awkward, but usually in the opposite order. She is the Assistant Editor and videographer for Peach Fuzz, a sex-positive nudie magazine in ATX.