NO ON CALIF. MCE!

WHY FORCING CONTINUING EDUCATION ON THE MANY TO UPLIFT THE FEW IS A BAD IDEA

Editorial By Robert Scott, P.I.

MCE stands for mandatory continuing education. MCE is now being hotly debated in California, where legislation is pending that will force ALL private investigators seeking to renew their bi-annual P.I. licenses to attend 12 classroom hours on a variety of subjects including privacy law and ethics.

In addition to the fees for these classes, licensing fees will also rise and there will be new paperwork requirements to keep track of and file MCE credits with the state.

Although CE (Continuing Education) is applauded, MCE is not. In fact, it's a stink bomb waiting to explode. The problem is the MANDATORY part. Why? Because it penalizes the majority of licensed private investigators who are solid professionals. They stay up to date with legal, ethical and other advances. They read professional journals, subscribe to listserves and attend association meetings. To get their licenses in the first place, they had to have 6,000 hours of experience, undergo a background check, and pass a written exam. Why should they be FORCED to attend weekend or late night classes about something they already know? Just so a few stragglers who haven't stayed current can be pushed into a forced learning environment?

In addition, the proposed law (SB 202) places new costs and administrative burdens on private investigators. As we speak, many are struggling to stay in business. Asking more of them now is tantamount to a new tax. Sadly, this will only serve to put some of them out of business.

The proposed new law will also create a new mini-bureacracy of MCE providers as well. For investigators who live in remote areas away from urban centers, long drives and overnight stays in hotels may be required. And once it does become law, it will be virtually impossible to undo.

CALI - the California Association of Licensed Investigators - strongly supports MCE at the leadership level. But even they know they're trying to sell something that's not wanted -- discussion of the topic has been banned on the association's main listserve. Why, if MCE is such a good idea, are the main proponents of it afraid of an open discussion?

MCE is an unexploded stink bomb that can still be defused. If you're a licensed private investigator in California, please make your voice heard in Sacramento against MCE!

INVESTIGATION OF PREPAID CELL PHONES

By Robert Scott, P.I.

Prepaid cell phones present a vexing challenge to investigators, cops and skiptracers. For around thirty bucks, an anonymous dial tone can be obtained. No name is required. No I.D. check. No billing information. No questions asked. Just walk into Walmart or any other outlet that sells prepaid cell phones and you’ll walk out with a working phone line that’s virtually impossible to trace. If you’re a bad guy in the crime business, this is a good thing. If your job is tracking down bad guys, it’s a bad thing.

Did you know that phone company identifier searches at phonevalidator.com and fonefinder.net and similar searches elsewhere don’t identify most prepaid cell phones? These searches are based on telephone company records called NPA/NXX data. NPA/NXX data identifies the owner of blocks of phone numbers. But in the case of most prepaid phone services, their phone numbers are purchased or leased from traditional cell phone companies that are listed in the NPA/NXX records.

For example, Tracfone leases service from several different cell carriers. So, you could run a phone number and it could come back as a Verizon phone through NPA/NXX data when in fact it’s a prepaid Tracfone. Likewise, prepaid service Boost Mobile could come back as Sprint or Nextel. The exception to this is MetroPCS and Cricket prepaid phones, which usually come up under their own names.

I recently put out posts on investigative listserves asking for phone numbers that were absolutely, positively known to be for prepaid cell phones. The phone numbers were then ran through NPA/NXX data to see how they would come up. Here are the results:

Tracfone comes up as Verizon or T-Mobile or Cingular

Boost Mobile comes up as Sprint or Nextel

Go Phone comes up as AT&T

T-Mobile To Go comes up as T-Mobile

MetroPCS comes up as MetroPCS or Royal Street Communications

Cricket comes up as Cricket or Leap Wireless

So, an investigator who gets a hit through NPA/NXX data showing a cell phone is with a major cell service like Verizon should heed warning. He may subpoena the records, only to find it’s been leased to Tracfone. A new subpoena is directed at Tracfone, only to learn that no subscriber information is on file. In the two weeks it took to get subpoena results returned from the phone companies, the bad guy has since tossed the phone out the car window and already has a new one. The investigator might be feeling like he’s been tossed out the window, too.

Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book." Reprint permission.

CRIME SMASHER WEBSITE RELEASED!

Private Investigators and others who have a need to run online criminal background checks now have a new way to get more in-depth information. CrimeSmasher.com, the newest website by P.I. Robert Scott offers not only traditional criminal records, but also records from two new sources that simply weren't available outside of law enforcement until recently.

"What's new is the availability of private sector versions of the FBI's wants and warrants and arrest reports," said Scott, a Los Angeles-based private investigator and creator of several high-traffic websites for investigators. "It used to be you simply couldn't access this non-conviction information unless you had a police badge. You were stuck with criminal court convictions, for the most part. Now, there's tens of millions of records of these new types of records available. The data has been collected one jurisdiction at a time by public record aggregators who had the foresight to look into the future and see that one day this data would eventually have value." He said by combining these new criminal record types with traditional ones, Crime Smasher offers a newer, more in-depth way to uncover criminal history information.

Crime Smasher can be found at CrimeSmasher.com. No membership is required to use the website.

Reprint permission.

NEW OFFICIAL CODE FOR LOCATING PERSONS

By Robert Scott, P.I.

A private investigator is hired to locate a person. The P.I. succeeds. His client is happy. His client turns out to be a stalker. The person located is harassed, harmed or worse. This is every thinking P.I.'s worst nightmare.

NCISS, the national association for investigators, has now come forward with an official position on locating persons. It also includes dissemination of personally identifying information. Although long overdue, the move is noteworthy as it puts the stamp of a recognized organization on what has long been seen as an "industry best practice."

Here's the official NCISS position:

"A member shall, prior to providing a person any personally identifying or location information of an individual, conduct appropriate due diligence to ensure that the person has a legitimate business or legal interest in obtaining that information. When such due diligence is not possible or appropriate, or if the person appears to not have a legal or business interest, the person shall be informed that their contact information will be provided to the subject they are seeking and the personal identifying information of the subject they are seeking will only be provided to the person if that party consents."

Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book." Reprint permission.

IDENTIFICATION OF VONAGE PHONE NUMBERS

By Robert Scott, P.I.

VOIP phone numbers present a special challenge to investigators and skiptracers. A person with a VOIP phone number, like those from Vonage, could be physically located anywhere in the world - despite having an area code that suggests otherwise. Unfortunately, there is no single trick or database for identifying whether or not a phone number is in fact a VOIP line. But with the assistance of investigators from around the country, it's now possible to determine if a phone number is from Vonage - the largest service provider of VOIP in the U.S.

When run through publicly available phone company identifier websites like fonefinder.net or phonevalidator.com, Vonage numbers don't come up as "Vonage" as the company uses subcarriers for its phone connections. To try and determine which phone carriers these might be, a request was put out on investigative listserves asking members who positively, absolutely knew a phone number to be a Vonage line to send it in. The results were as follows:

Focal Communications 60%

Level 3 Communications 30%

XO Communications 10%

So, when using a phone company identifier website like phonevalidator.com, if one of these carriers comes up, there's a good possibility the phone number is from Vonage.

Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book." Reprint permission.

NEW P.O. BOX LOCATOR SEARCH ANNOUNCED!

Black Book Online, the free search site for investigators and skiptracers, has launched a unique new search engine that finds the physical location of a post office that corresponds to a P.O. box address.

"The most obvious use of the search is for locating witnesses and skips who are using a post office box for their mail," says private investigator and site creator Robert Scott. "People typically live close to their P.O. box for the sake of convenience. An investigator looking for someone will often have multiple possible addresses developed through public records and commercial skiptracing data. Knowing which address is closest to the P.O. box can be significant."

Scott says the search engine is the first of its kind and was built with data obtained from the post office. "This could have been built long ago, but no one else thought of it or cared to do it. The post office does have a post office locator on its website that will work based on a zip code. The problem is, some zip codes have multiple post offices in the zip code. For example, in Los Angeles, there's one zipcode with four post offices. Our search engine is able to tell the user which of the four the actual P.O. box is located at."

The P.O. box search has also been integrated into select search results at SkipSmasher.com, Scott's restricted-access website for professional investigators and skiptracers.

For the free version of the P.O. box locator, visit the main page at Black Book Online, located at www.BlackBookOnline.info.

DIGITAL COPIERS SECURITY RISK?

By Robert Scott, P.I.

Photocopiers can now be added to the list of items leaking personal data, according to the Sharp copier company. The company recently released a security advisory warning that the hard drives on many photocopiers are storing scanned documents -- long after actual copies have been made.

Does this mean that a person who stops by the corner copy shop to copy his income tax form is at risk of his personal information being compromised? Or that anyone with access to the company office machine after hours can do some unauthorized intelligence gathering?

This story was widely circulated on Internet news sites and elsewhere recently. I wanted to learn if this was really true or just an Internet myth, so I made a trip to my local copy shop. There were two basic types of copiers. A Xerox Docucolor and a Canon ImageRunner. I couldn't get anything out of the Xerox. On the Canon, after exploring the various menus and submenus I found my way to a "recall" option where the last three items printed were still available! I picked one and it started printing out 60 copies of an actress's resume! Apparently, that's who had been on the machine before me! So, is there a security flaw on some digital copy machines? Apparently so!

Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book." Reprint permission.

SKIPTRACE SEMINAR.COM LAUNCHES!

SkiptraceSeminar.com, the new website from Robert Scott, has just launched! The site is for any skiptracer with less than two years of experience or any skiptracer with more experience who never developed a solid foundation on how to skiptrace.

SkiptraceSeminar.com is three hours long and is available online 24/7. The introductory cost is just $15. It's hosted by Robert Scott, P.I. -- author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book" and creator of the websites BlackBookOnline.info and SkipSmasher.com. For full details, please visit:

www.SkiptraceSeminar.com

NEW PHONE VALIDATOR WEBSITE LAUNCHES!

Investigators and skiptracers seeking to learn if a phone number is a landline or a cell phone can now use our new free website at:

www.PhoneValidator.com

The site also allows users to automatically run the phone number through directory assistance and Google to develop new leads.

RESOURCES:

Black Book Online: Free Database Searches!

P.I. Directory: Need a P.I.?

P.I. Licensing Directory

SSN Validator - FREE!!!

Phone Validator - FREE!!!

SkiptraceSeminar.com

Best-Seller!!!!

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New e-Book!

Learn How to Skiptrace! Click Book Cover for Details!