What is Surveillance?
Surveillance is the close observation of a person, place, or object. It is the practice of watching a subject in order to document the interactions or whereabouts of the subject.
What is the purpose of the surveillance?
The purpose of the surveillance is to collect information. Surveillance method can be used by a debt recovery agent, private investigator, lawyer, police detective, journalist, stalker or any person attempting to locate a person whose contact information is not immediately known. Surveillance can be used when locating a missing person, cheating spouse investigation, recurrent theft, fraud investigation and criminal investigations.
What are the steps to follow during a surveillance process?
There steps consists of:
• Verifying the information provided by the client to understand who the subject is and if the client has incorrect information.
• The investigator has to start collecting as much information as possible on the subject.
• The information is then analyzed, reduced and verified. Sometimes, the current location of the subject is in the data, but it is obscured by the amount of information or misinformation.
The work often becomes more than just research, as it often requires the use of electronic surveillance, physical observation, interviews and technical surveillance, which involves calling or visiting former neighbors, or other known contacts to ask questions about the subject, sometimes under false or misleading pretexts.
The records used by investigators may include telephone numbers, database, employment application information, criminal background checks, utility bills (electricity, gas, water, waste water, telephone, Internet and cable), social security information, or a vehicle tracking system. Some of these documents may be accessible to the public, but some are not accessible without an appropriate search warrant, which is generally only available to law enforcement or licensed private investigators.
Even when no specific information is returned, there are public and private databases that reference track informationwith others with whom they may have lived in the recent past. For example, if previous records indicate that a subject has lived in the same house as a third party, the third party may also be ignored in order to locate the main target.
Nowadays, a lot of online searches are done using paid search sites and phone calls. They will subscribe to a number of paid databases to help them collect and verify information.
Why do we conduct surveillance?
We have a very good number of reasons, why we have to conduct surveillance.
• To prevent crimes from occurring
• To obtain evidence that we need
• To obtain evidence in civil suits
• To document an individual’s location/address
• To document activities in and around a location/ vicinity
• To obtain information for interrogation purposes
• To obtain information to be used in court
For more information on surveillance reach out to Worldwide Investigators Agency in Cameroon at : https://www.wia-cameroun.com/surveillance-investigations/