Clients of private investigation firms seek to locate persons for a broad range of purposes. Some common reasons include: recovering a debt, getting in touch with a long-lost family member or sweetheart, locating a witness in a civil matter or a criminal trial and finding a beneficiary in a will. There are in fact all sorts of unusual situations in which finding people is necessary.
For private investigators, locating persons has traditionally been a difficult task. The way that Western liberal democracies are structured enables citizens and residents to exercise a lot of freedom with respect to their movements and living arrangements. Consequently, data registries that record the places of residence of persons in a country such as Australia, while often useful, are not comprehensive. Civil libertarians would see an attempt to formulate a comprehensive registry of this type as dangerous and despotic – for example, see the failed Australia Card.
Not only are registries of personal information not comprehensive, they are not perfectly accurate. Even purportedly accurate databases, such as land titles records, do not contain 100% accurate information – I know this from having seen errors myself on land titles and within databases used to access land title information.
Fortunately, with the development of technology and the advancement of public record databases, there are now more resources available to private investigators than ever before. Public record databases, especially those operated by private entities, are increasingly helpful and prolific. They can contain quite up-to-date information and can usually be accessed online reasonably quickly. Since I personally became involved in the private investigations industry in 2009 the amount of information available just on Google alone has expanded greatly.
What all of this means is that locating persons should not be considered to be an exact science and it should be crystal clear that some people simply cannot be found. It’s important to note however that a professional and experienced investigator is seeing his or her success rate increase owing to the relative wealth of information that is now accessible. That has certainly been the case at Lyonswood Investigations & Forensics, the firm I operate, over the last 10 years or so.
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