Episode 38: The Modern Detective with Tyler Maroney, PI

In this week's episode, Leah has the opportunity to interview Tyler Maroney, PI and author of The Modern Detective. Tyler's new book is a must-read as it provides entertaining real-world private investigator stories mixed with advice and tricks and tips of the trade.

Tyler Maroney has worked as a private investigator at Kroll, the Mintz Group, and now as co-founder of the private investigations firm Quest Research & Investigations. Before becoming an investigator Maroney was a Fulbright scholar and worked as a journalist. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, and Frontline.

The Modern Detective is available for purchase on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Detective-Corporate-Intelligence-Reshaping/dp/1594632596.

Follow Tyler Maroney on Twitter @tydamar.

Links from tools Tyler recommends in the episode: www.domaintool.com

Subscribe to Workman Forensics.

Transcript for Episode 38: The Modern Detective with Tyler Maroney, PI

Leah Wietholter (00:00):

Hi, I'm Leah Wietholter owner of Workman forensics. And this is the investigation game podcast.

Leah Wietholter (00:12):

Welcome to the investigation game podcast. I'm your host, Leah Wietholter CEO of Workman forensics in Tulsa, Oklahoma. On today's episode, I have the privilege of interviewing Tyler Maroney. Tyler is the author of the modern detective and cofounder of the private investigations from quest research and investigations. Prior to quest, Tyler worked as a private investigator at Kroll and the Mintz group before becoming an investigator. Maroney was a Fulbright scholar and worked as a journalist. His work has appeared in the wall street journal, the New York times, fortune and frontline. Thank you for joining me today, Tyler.

Tyler Maroney (00:46):

Thank you for having me, Leah. It's a pleasure.

Leah Wietholter (00:48):

So we're here today to discuss your book, the modern detective, which is actually being released today, September 29th. Uh, but before we discuss the book, tell us a little about your background. What made you decide to go from journalism to PI work?

Tyler Maroney (01:02):

So I spent about 10 years as a journalist and I was mostly what we call a generalist, which means one week I covered diplomacy the next week I covered art. And the week after that I covered sports and that fit my personality because I was too curious to give anything up. However, about eight or 10 years into my career, I discovered investigative journalism and people are fond of saying that all journalism is investigative, but I disagree. And for me, investigative journalism really helped me focus my interest. And it became a fascinating way of exploring journalism through a very narrow lens. And for me, it was about finding hidden information and revealing that information, as opposed to say a profile of a business leader or a, you know, an overview of an industry or something that most investigative journalists generally avoid. And by chance, I met somebody at Kroll associates, which is the kind of legendary corporate investigative firm that's been around since the early 1970s and crawl over the years. There's always hired people from journalism as well as many other fields. And one thing led to another. And because I had been doing some investigative journalism, it felt like a really natural next step for my career.

Leah Wietholter (02:28):

Oh, that you're a private investigator. What do you find most rewarding from your work or the most

Tyler Maroney (02:32):

Challenging? What's wonderful about the job and I'm guessing you'll agree with this, this, that every day, every week, every month is a new challenge. I mean, it's not a cliche to say that we get to solve mysteries and get to find hidden information and, and work on puzzles all the time. And that really gives it an energy and a fascination and it, and it makes it rewarding for me. I think the other thing which I, I go into in book as this idea that the private investigator is often stereotypes and not even as one kind of detective, but many different types, right? I mean, we have the, the assumption that all private eyes were doing surveillance or that they're former spies or that they're using shady tactics, or maybe that they're all former law enforcement. And of course, none of that is true. And, um, what I found incredibly rewarding is the ability to work with so many people from so many different backgrounds, whether it's those of yours, forensic accountants, for example, or people who did come out of the intelligence services or journalism and many other backgrounds, and also to work on projects that touch almost every angle of the economy and law.

Tyler Maroney (03:49):

I mean, we have clients that are lawyers that work for NGOs that are big corporate interests from overseas, or that are small nonprofits from around the corner and even individuals and everyone has got a slightly different problem or a slightly different question, which means that there is no component of our work that is cookie cutter and it's approach.

Leah Wietholter (04:13):

Yeah, I do agree with that. And actually that kind of leads into my first question about your book is that in the modern detective, you just masterfully write about true private investigator stories, which I love. Some of them are your own. Some of them are from others, but reading these stories really challenged me as an investigator to examine my work and techniques and to ask myself like, am I pushing the limits of my imagination from, you know, the types of cases we work, the location of the cases that we work, the methods of the cases. And so one of my favorite quotes was in chapter five by Fisher, you quoted him saying raw intelligence is not much use to anyone. Its significance often lies in the analysis. So why did you consider this important in telling his story and where have you found this to be true in your experience? And if you want to recap any of that story or just kind of give a little summary for our listeners, feel free.

Tyler Maroney (05:09):

Sure. So this is a chapter in which I profile a private investigator, whose name is Julian Fisher, he's English. And he worked for many years for the British government doing intelligence work, but now focuses his private investigative work on Africa, where he spent a lot of time overseas and knows the region well. And Julian is a fascinating profile because I learned a lot just meeting with him and listening to him talk because the way to oversimplify his work is that he does due diligence for non-African clients who want to do business in the region, or have some kind of dispute there that they need his help on. But what he really does is he is a kind of foyer to a foreign land for people. He isn't a translator, a fixer, but an incredibly intelligent person with local knowledge that understands not just the customs and the rhythms of a place, but things creatively about how to find information in legal ways.

Tyler Maroney (06:12):

And Julian's quote about raw intelligence is a wonderful one for us, for a member, because his point is you can collect information, but it doesn't really mean anything if you haven't given it the kind of context that a client needs. And I'll try to be brief here. But the chapter in which I write about Julian is about how there had been some terrorist attacks in East Africa and his client who was not from East Africa, owned a number of properties there. And wondered if the properties that were owned by the client were under attack specifically because they were owned by the client. Meaning was he being targeted in some way? What we discovered ultimately was that the client was not being targeted or excuse me, what Julian discovered, what he found ultimately was it, this was part of a broader group of actions by local terrorists, um, designed to essentially create chaos, to stir up the political scene at the time because elections were upcoming and Julian was able to discover that through tapping into a wide network of contacts that he had in the area, um, in Mombasa and was able to help give the client comfort that his investments were not in any danger any more than anyone else in the region.

Tyler Maroney (07:29):

So I hope that wasn't too long of a way of explaining that Julian's intelligence and local contacts were able to give his client confidence that he could continue to operate in the region

Leah Wietholter (07:41):

Within the chapter. There are a lot of facts and there are a lot of things that Fisher uncovered that he could have just gone and just said, here's some things that I found, but he connected what he found, essentially the raw intelligence with solving the problem or the concern that the client had. And so I really think that for me, when I was first starting my practice, one of my first assignments from somebody, uh, it was actually another CFE. He said, Hey, this PI just ran a whole bunch of TLO reports. And I mean, it was like he printed them all out. So I mean, we're talking several inches thick of paper, and then the pie just gave this to the client, just gave them like, here's you asked me to run some database or just here you go. And, um, so what I was tasked with was taking that information and of course, because of the way I'm wired, I digitized it. And it started looking for connections, which is really what the client was wanting the client of the first pie, you know, that wasn't what that client was looking for. And so I, I just thought it was a great, there's just a great lesson in that chapter about connecting that. And that's where that value is that sure. We can find out lots of facts, lots people can do that, but connecting it to solve a problem or our client's concern is really important.

Tyler Maroney (09:00):

I couldn't agree more. That's a great anecdote. And it reminds me that we all in our field have to keep, not just the fact in mind that we should not just be gathering information and analyzing it, but also answering the client's specific question. I'll give a quick example from our own work, my firm, which I founded with my partner, Luke Brendel Kim, which is called QRI quest research and investigations. We make an effort to do a lot of work that we feel benefits to public interest. And part of that is doing investigations into wrongful convictions. And I think that sometimes people think what that means is investigating the cops. And that's not necessarily true. Cause when you were working for somebody who's been wrongfully convicted, there are a lot of reasons why that might've happened. And so we often keep in mind that the goal is not necessarily to catch the actual perpetrator, although that would be a nice benefit of it, but it's to figure out what happened in that Daisy chain of law enforcement's investigation that led to the wrongful conviction in the first place. Maybe it was a mistake made by law enforcement. Maybe it was a false confession. Maybe it was some kind of junk science that was slipped into a proceeding. And it's really that understanding of what our clients in this case, lawyers who do civil rights work in addition to wrongful convictions need. And so I think listening to your client is an incredibly valuable if slightly cliched thing to say, and to remember, because if you're not giving your client what they're looking for, you're probably not going to get called back again for a second assignment.

Leah Wietholter (10:35):

I feel like most client concerns just come in the form of like lots of stories. Like, let me tell you about this, that this happened, then this, you know, and, and I guess their kind of emotional connection of how this all came about. And so getting them to really identify what their concern is, is a challenge. And we've worked to try to like help them discover that. But then at the same time, some things as an investigator, there's things to me that, you know, you don't want to know where that, how that money was spent. And they're like, no, I don't care. I just need to know how much I lost. But for me the investigator I'm like, but, but I would want to know how they spent it, you know, and, and the client doesn't necessarily care about that. So it's answering their questions. And then also like kind of putting the restraints on myself that I don't just keep going when that's not what they asked for. So

Tyler Maroney (11:28):

I couldn't agree more. I think that too often investigators think that they're private investigators that is, think that their job is to catch bad guys. When in fact it's to find the information that the client needs in whatever format that is. Yes. 100% absolutely agree.

Leah Wietholter (11:44):

I'm talking about your wrongful conviction type cases. I, in the first chapter you tell a story about a case where you interviewed a man named in Tony, am I saying that right? Correct. So this is an incredible story in that line of obtaining evidence to help someone who was convicted of a crime, they didn't commit. And what I found interesting about this story was that you didn't simply find a person using databases like we've been talking about and then provide the information to an attorney who would then depose them. And I feel like that's a pretty common like pattern, find information, give it to the attorney, let the attorney to depose him. You actually went and talked to them and yourself. So how did this come about? Was this your original task, or did you have discretion about how far you could research or investigate? How did that come about that you decided that you would go talk to that person instead of having an attorney to post?

Tyler Maroney (12:37):

Yeah. Well, it's another great question because it reminds me that different lawyer clients have different understandings of in relationships with investigators that they hire. In this case, we are working with a law firm with whom we'd worked many times just before. And they always give us quite a lot of leeway to think through how to find information. There were plenty of other witnesses by the way, in this case that we found and provided the names of two the lawyer. But in most cases in these scenarios, we are the first point of contact with witnesses, with prospective witnesses. And if those witnesses feel like they are going to be valuable to the client, we then of course introduce them to the lawyers who then have an additional conversation and perhaps get an affidavit or, or somehow memorialize the conversation. But in this case, we didn't really know the value of who he would be.

Tyler Maroney (13:30):

And so showing up at his door, as I described doorstepping to use the phrase that did PIs like to use, we thought it was going to be, you know, we would have one chance at him because if we called him, he could easily hang up on us. Of course, if we showed up at his house and he slammed the door in our face, we would also know that what the answer was. But one of the things I try to convey in this chapter is that the way to approach people is often best done with kindness and with open arms, so to speak as opposed to being aggressive and antagonistic in any way, because we want to essentially, and I think I've used this phrase in the chapter to deputize him in a way is to, to make him feel and to make them understand that we really do need his help and that he may have information that can be incredibly valuable towards helping a client and freeing a man from prison who should not, should not be there.

Tyler Maroney (14:26):

And the reason that this chapter ended up being great was because, well, at least the witness was great is because Kia immediately recognized the value of what he could bring. And we knew that he himself had had a long history of criminal behavior had been in and out of prison for most of his life. Um, but we knew that he was out now in home. He's a little older. And so maybe had, we were gambling had been able to think through whether or not it was time, just tell the truth. And we got lucky and, and Tony was able to, and willing to tell us everything because he knew that he was no longer going to be targeted. And he also, wasn't afraid of, of telling the truth at this point in his career.

Leah Wietholter (15:06):

I love that idea of approaching a situation. Like you said, deputizing the witness and giving them like a role in this story instead of putting them on the defense. And, um, that's definitely one of those takeaways from the book that I'm like putting in my toolkit. We don't do a whole lot of interviews now, like I used to, but my approach was always, let's just be best friends. And, you know, then they'll talk to me. But, um, I like this idea of, you know, that they could have this role to play. And I mean, who doesn't want to be part of something bigger than themselves, even if, you know, they've, even if the story doesn't look kindly on their actions.

Tyler Maroney (15:49):

Exactly. And that's not to say that every interview of course has that component. I mean, if you're doing an internal investigation and you have to essentially confront an employee with evidence that she has stolen trade secrets, that's not going to be as easy going to conversation. But I think the generally when talking to witnesses who you believe can really benefit you and that they have a motive to talk, that that approach can be really valuable. Yeah.

Leah Wietholter (16:20):

So I had a few other questions that came to mind when I was reading this story. And I like to ask this of experienced investigators as well. So how do you know when you've reached the answer you're looking for? Or how do you know when to stop digging and what are the factors in making that decision?

Tyler Maroney (16:35):

Well, I'll give you the cynical answer. One is when the budget runs out and your deadline is over, it's funny. Two of the things that are it make investigative work the hardest are those to money and time. But I think the, the more serious answer is if you've taken into consideration what your client needs. And here's one thing we do often is try to bake ourselves into the case as much as possible so that you become indispensable to the case. My business partner, Luke Brngal, Kim did a fantastic job of this. When we were working for the rapper meek mill a few years ago, whose defense team hired us to help him. He'd been in prison for some very minor probation violations. And what Luke did better than anyone in the room was that he learned the facts of the case. He knew every date.

Tyler Maroney (17:24):

He knew every time he knew every name, he knew every place better than the lawyers did better than anyone did. And that kind of discipline that kind of obsession. So to speak with an investigator can make it incredibly valuable. And in that sense, you show how committed you are to a case. And we find that allows us to work on cases. What might be considered a longer period of time than usual. I mean, our PR firm in particular is not built around volume. We're not trying to do 10,000 cases for an hour. Each we're trying to do 20 cases for six months each. And that we have the advantage of, you know, reading every footnote in every document, um, and getting obsessed with it. So I think, I think that the short answer to your question is make yourself a subject matter expert and then prove that you are that to your client.

Leah Wietholter (18:16):

Yeah. That's a great answer. I completely agree. We've definitely been able to, to learn more and to help the client more by becoming just that. Even if it, at first, I thought, why do I know about all 13,000 pages of these documents? Well, they need us at trial. You know, like it does it, it lends to more engagement and, and I think greater value in the end when you're not having to stop at, okay, we checked these few things often, here's your bill. We'll be right back to this interview. So yeah, since the investigation game was first put out into the world, we finally have a second game. Yes we do. So I want to know all about it. What's different from case of the man cave. What is this game about and how can players access it? This investigation game is called the case of the cashflow fiasco.

Leah Wietholter (19:08):

And this is really focusing on the risks to vendors and creditors when their customers are having cashflow issues and some of the things to look out for, and some of the fraud schemes that can be implemented because when a customer is in a cashflow crisis, they're looking for anything to just keep them and to try to help them get through a cashflow fiasco. Right? And so in the beginning presentation, we talk about those things. We talk about the risks that are involved and things that vendors and creditors can do to just monitor for these cashflow issues. Then you have 30 minutes to play the actual game. And what's cool about this game is that this one was actually made to play virtually. So you can play as an individual. You can play as a group, you can play with your chapter, but it's 100% digital online.

Leah Wietholter (20:02):

It was made for that. Not just adapted for online because COVID happened. So I'm really excited. This one, I also think has more of an escape room type feel. And you have the 30 minutes to put together how much was stolen, how did they do it? What existed, what didn't exist. There's a lot of really fun things. And what I love it when you have been busting to make over the last few weeks are just all of these super creative elements of videos. And I don't, I don't want to spoil it and give it away, but like, there's just so many cool elements that you and Rachel have put together in this game. And then of course at the end, we'll do another 10 minute presentation of the solution. And we'll be able to tell people which players playing scored the highest points and we'll have a leaderboard and like all this stuff.

Leah Wietholter (20:47):

So really excited for the case of the cashflow fiasco. And this one is a 15 minute training. So you don't have to carve out two hours of your day. You can just play this for 50 minutes and get your CPE. And right now we will be taking presales and scheduling people to play this game through the end of October. And then we'll just have it on our website and you can go out and sign up and play it on our website. But it's a lot of fun. Cool. Well, I'm excited for it. Me too. You don't want to miss out. Believe me now, hopefully you guys are excited for it too, to learn more about the case of the cash flow fiasco, go to the investigation game.com. Welcome back to the podcast. How do you decide when it's appropriate to stop researching online and to go start talking to people?

Tyler Maroney (21:38):

I love that question because it's something we talk about all the time internally. I grew up in this industry working for big corporate investigations firms that I learned a lot from, but one of the things they often do the larger firms is they do a lot of research first and then they ask questions second. And that makes a lot of sense, especially when you're doing investigations in the United States where the public record is just massive compared to other places. I mean, if you, if you're doing investigations outside of the United States and outside of say Western Europe, there's just much less documentation, whether it's corporate records or litigation or property records or whatever, other kinds of documentation you're collecting and an honoring my earlier point about becoming an expert, we've tried to design investigations around getting the answer to the question quickly. And sometimes that means identifying a witness and calling her up as quickly as possible because she will have the answer as opposed to spending three weeks running through all the databases.

Tyler Maroney (22:45):

So I think it's a case by case basis, but I would say that generally our firm is designed to use research to answer the question until it doesn't answer it anymore. Whereas in some cases we realize that that's actually a mistake. So we pick up the phone right away. I will add just one thing to that, which is that many clients don't want you to pick up the phone or to talk to anybody because that can alert people to the investigation. It's not discreet. So in that case, when a client asks us to stick to research to databases, we do that.

Leah Wietholter (23:21):

Yeah. That's a good caveat for sure. Yeah. One of my favorite things to say is, um, we know we're done when we keep getting the same answer over and over. Like just let's just stop. Like, I don't know how many other ways you're going to calculate it and get something different. So, okay. Then this leads me to my third question. Were you always good at getting people to provide information to you? Well, and what are some of the techniques that you've learned and added to your tool throughout your career as a journalist and a private investigator?

Tyler Maroney (23:48):

I will answer the question with an anecdote. One of my first assignments at Crowell about 15 years ago, it was a pretty straightforward due diligence project where we were trying to vet the background. If somebody who was a candidate for a job. And one of the first things I did was I picked up the phone and I called about 20 people who used to work with this person and the case manager on this project. When he learned that I was doing that, he raced down the hallway and screamed at me and said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm doing due diligence. And he said, no phone calls, don't talk to anybody. And I kind of scratched my head and apologized and said, well, how are we going to learn anything about him? And that comes out of my kind of journalistic training of talking to sources.

Tyler Maroney (24:34):

Now that I've been in this industry for 15 years, um, I've learned how valuable getting obscured documents can be and doing research. But I, I bring that up because being a former journalist, I feel has given me a lot of training and competence about talking to people and the value of talking to people. Um, and I sometimes hear that some people have got the skills and other people don't, and that they're not even trainable that, that, that that's a skill that can't be trained. And I'm not sure that I agree with that. I think that talking to other people is, is not only incredibly valuable and necessary, but it's something that we all do all the time. So just because you're not the most charismatic, experienced, um, social person doesn't mean that you can't be incredibly useful as an interviewer. And I'll give you a few quick examples.

Tyler Maroney (25:27):

We have a few people who've worked with us over the years who are relatively shy and quiet, but they have confidence. And those two points seem to be in contradiction, but they're not. And I think that people who can come across as shy and naive, even if they're not, can be incredibly valuable as interviewers, because simply confessing that you don't understand a topic or need to know more, as opposed to going through the door with full confidence that you know exactly what to do and how to do it can be really useful. Does that answer your question?

Leah Wietholter (26:03):

Yes, absolutely. And I, I love the point that you made that you can learn to talk to people because I am definitely living proof of that. I did not like to talk to people when I was younger and in high school, and now I host this podcast and it's one of my favorite things. No, but I can do, you know, like interviews and I don't know. I just think that a lot of successful professionals have to be able to communicate in some way, especially in our field and that it can be learned. I think a lot of times we just assume that because our personality we've been told our personalities a certain way, or we believe it's a certain way that we can't, that the communication piece can't be learned because, well, you know, this just how I am, but I believe it can be because I had to learn.

Tyler Maroney (26:47):

Can I give you one example of that from a different field? I once listened to the podcast by Dan Tyburski called Mitch missing Richard Simmons, which was a huge hit in the pocket for a few years ago about Richard Simmons, who was this? An exercise phenomenon in the 1980s. Anyway, at 1.2, Bursky the host knocks on the door of, I think it's Simmons his brother because he wants to talk to him because he's trying to find Richard Simmons and the brother freaks out at him and slams the door on his face and says, get outta here a few hours later to Bursky realizes what a mistake that was. He calls him up and he says something to the effect of I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I know you have no idea who I am. I made a huge mistake and he basically falls on his sword and it's totally confessional about how he used the wrong tactic. What that led to was a long, fascinating conversation with the source that he didn't think he would have. And I think that's an example of something that people, whether you're doing investigative work or journalism or human rights work or accounting, is treat people with respect, especially if you need their help.

Leah Wietholter (28:02):

Yeah. That's a great story. Some other tips that you provide in the book relate to resources. And so I kind of started making a list myself, um, because I hadn't thought of some of these.

Tyler Maroney (28:13):

So when it comes to resources, we are always striving to find new ones. And that I hope is what gives us some credibility with our clients, because one of the things I'm learning every day that I suspect everyone in our field is, is that you can't tell your client that you're going to do some public records research anymore because so many people have access to many of the records you do, for example, pacer, which is the database of federal civil criminal, and van graphy litigation. It's not some secret tool that only private eyes and lawyers have access to anyone can access pacer and find civil legal filings, or I'll give a quick anecdote, which reminds me of how easily information is found even to the surprise of others. I have a friend who said, I want to make a pitch to my boss, that I should get a raise, but I want to know how much money he makes.

Tyler Maroney (29:10):

Can you help me with that? And I said, sure, no problem. I went away three days later, I met my friend at a diner and I had in a envelope, an unmarked envelope, a document, and I slid it across the desk trying to be as kind of secretive and mysterious as I could. She opened up the document and highlighted in yellow was her boss's salary on a document. She looked at me as if I had hacked into somebody's email or snuck into an office at night. What I'd really is downloaded the nine nineties for the company where she works. I knew that she worked for a nonprofit, and I knew that nonprofits must disclose the salaries of their highest paid employees. It took me about 30 seconds to find the answer to a question. And I just use that as an example of how knowing where information lives is an incredibly valuable tool to have in our industry.

Tyler Maroney (30:06):

And a few other quick examples I'll give are learning where regulatory records live. We've done investigations into pharmaceutical companies by getting copies from state department of health agencies, by using foyer requests, for example, getting documents from government agencies that have information on contracts. So if you have a company that you're investigating that, you know, has government contracts, of course, you're going to look for news reports and litigation and others, but actually getting those contracts themselves. And then the last thing I'll add to your question about resources is it's not just what the resource is, but what information lives in that resource? For example, you might find a copy of a tax lien that has an address on it that gives you a new lead and investigation. Whereas the amount of the tax lien is totally irrelevant. We've used as many of those of those who are listening to this podcast have uniform commercial code financing statements, which are incredibly boring documents that explain the relationship between a borrower and a lender. But in fact, they have incredibly useful information about where money lives and who owes what money to whom and as a forensic accountant, I suspect those are the kinds of documents you're using all the time and your work.

Leah Wietholter (31:26):

Yes. That makes the top of our list. Those types of things. One of the areas that in one of those stories that you tell in the book that an investigator used was even looking up web domains to see who owns different web domains. And I thought, Oh, of course. So that's one of those that I kind of jotted down because personally, if I am creating a new business, I go in to buy the domain immediately. Even if I'm like, Oh, I might do this next year. I go buy the domain. And so that would be really valuable, especially in our work that would most likely be used in a divorce case. But I agree just knowing the way to look at information and what information is there, like you said, and kind of having that catalog in my mind so that whenever I hear of a problem or a concern that I can say, Oh, well, we could go check here and here. And that's what I really enjoyed about that chapter was just a lot of the different ideas. Like you just mentioned.

Tyler Maroney (32:23):

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I think doing what people call cyber investigation is, you know, obviously a growing field and the more of an understanding you have about digital information and where it lives and how to find it, the more valuable you are going to be to clients, no matter what kind of case you're doing, whether it's civil litigation dispute or matrimonial dispute or an asset search, I completely agree.

Leah Wietholter (32:47):

So there's a couple stories in the modern detective about finding assets in bankruptcy or for bankruptcy trustees. Do you have a favorite case you've worked where you had to use some creative, but still legal. You do emphasize that a lot in the book that you still maintain ethical and legal standards to locate these acts.

Tyler Maroney (33:07):

Yeah. I mean, it's disconcerting that we work in an industry where you have to keep reminding people that you're not a crook. Having said that it's really fun to watch private eyes on television and read about them. I mean, I'm obsessive self mythologizing all the time by reading, you know, old Raymond Chandler novels, for example, but in terms of asset searching, which is something we do often, and which has really goes to the core of good investigative work, I feel because more than any other practice areas, so to speak, it requires that you reinvent the wheel. So to speak every single time because every subject is going to live in a different place and have worked in a different industry and have a different footprint. Is the example I give in the book is it is an asset search, which was done by some British private detectives on behalf of an American bankruptcy trustee.

Tyler Maroney (33:56):

And when you think about it, bankruptcy trustees are essentially doing asset searches. I mean, their job is to recover missing money for creditors, for lenders. And it's not uncommon for law firms and forensic accountants in particular, as well as private detectives to help those trustees find those breadcrumbs and discover the money. And I mentioned the uniform commercial code financing statement is one that we use often because those are often filed by people who get into some kind of relationship with a borrower, um, years ago. And then they remain in the public record. So going and looking at them can be very valuable, but I'll, I'll use another example that you mentioned, which is internet research, doing web domain work finding, for example, who is the registrar of a website and what her phone number is and where that site was registered is incredibly valuable. Even beyond the fact that it was registered or the name of the registration.

Tyler Maroney (34:58):

So one of the tools that we love to use is domain tools, which I suspect many of your listeners are. Aren't very comfortable with using another one is archive.org, the way back machine. Again, I'm sure most listeners are familiar with these, but I would encourage people to use them over and over and over again, because those are two quite different domain tools. It's really about domain registrations. Whereas archive.org is about the archived websites that have since disappeared or older versions of websites. And one of the ways that we use archive.org is to find a former employees of a company. Because if you are listed on a website as an employee and you leave and 10 years go the way back machine may have captured that. And so if you have decided not to put that employment on your LinkedIn profile, or there is no news report mentioning your affiliation with it, archive.org is your answer.

Leah Wietholter (35:52):

That's cool. I am not familiar with those, but I will be making myself familiar with those and make sure Megan is familiar with those. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you so much for your time today, Tyler, to our listeners, I highly recommend purchasing a copy of the modern detective for yourself and anyone looking to get into this field. Tyler's retelling of the investigator's stories is extremely entertaining and very informative we'll list the link to purchase the modern detective in the show notes. And you can also follow Tyler on Twitter at Tai DeMar at T Y D a M a R. Again, thank you so much for your time today, Tyler,

Tyler Maroney (36:30):

Leah, I can't thank you enough for having me on today. It's an honor to be interviewed by a fellow private detective. Thank you.

Leah Wietholter (36:40):

The investigation game podcast is a production of Workman forensics. For more information about the topics we discuss on each episode, please visit Workman forensics.com. If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure to subscribe and leave us a review. You can also connect with us on any of the social media platforms by searching Workman forensics. If you have any questions, comments, or topic ideas for the podcast, please email us at podcast@workmanforensics.com.