-LazarusLong-

1. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes sometimes it takes months. One guy we have been looking for, I had been looking for him since February of this year and barely found him last week.

2. Do not use credit cards. Do not contact any former family members or friends. Use a burner phone. Do not have ANY social media profiles. Do not have any utilities in your name or rent anywhere under your name. Do not vote. Do not take out any hunting or fishing licenses. Do not get any tickets, get arrested, or go to court. You REALLY have to be living off grid in order for me not to find you. You basically have to be homeless.

3. A common instance is where we talk to family and friends. Family and friends ALWAYS give up the goods. We just sound friendly and like an actual human being and usually get all sorts of information from them. Ex wives/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends are the best for this. This one along with a very specific database we use are the two most effective tools we use.

4. I've seen them as little as $2,000. We get paid $500 per case we close in the office along with any bonus the clients offer us however the owner takes half of whatever we make. This means I make $250 per case I close. On a good week I've made $2,300 for one week worth of work. On a bad week I have made absolutely no money since I work on 100% commission. If we are just helping process servers we average about $60 per half hour of our time. Not me, but one of our other investigators was looking for a Dodge Viper valued at around $120K which she did successfully find.

Edit: Added some stuff.

Personally my most difficult one was locating a gentleman who had moved to a different state along with his wife. He left no forwarding info and I had no way to get a hold of him through the databases or phone numbers we had. Him and his wife did however have a Facebook which included public photos, but completely different states listed where they were living. I was able to locate them because his wife uploaded a photo of their new house which had only the number of the house. The wife's friend kept tagging the wife in halloween pictures but the wife's friend had a super common name. When I was looking through the wife's friend's husband's pictures I was able to see a partial dealer plate which helped me narrow the friends down to a specific city and state. When I looked up the friends up in our database I looked up their address in google maps and they had a very similar house number to the individual I was looking for. So I used the picture I initially found of the wife along with the street name of the friend and lo and behold I was able to locate them!

I felt so fucking boss! I actually took a shot of tequila, did a fist pump, and then a jump kick. The feeling is AMAZING when you connect the dots. Thanks for following!

I haven't seen a single portrayal EVER that gets our job correctly. The First 48 sometimes I have seen them use the same tools that we use. One of the databases is the same one law enforcement uses if I am not mistaken.

I get to the office at 9am. I work my cases and make calls until about noon. I open a bottle of wine at noon, have lunch, and wait for calls to come in throughout the rest of the day. From about one pm to about five pm I'm talking to individuals and doing research in between. Depending on if we had a good day making money sometimes I leave at five or maybe a little earlier. If we're having a tough day or are having a good day (or sometimes no reason) we keep a bottle of tequila we do shots from throughout the day haha. I'm 100% serious. I also browse reddit all day between working my cases such as when I'm on the phone.