‘I’m a private detective – you won’t believe how many people have secret families’

When he is on a surveillance operation, Dave Jones will often set his alarm for 2:30am. Getting up in the dark, he will gather his ‘grab bag’ – containing toothbrush, spare clothes, suit, chargers – and head for the car.

After meeting with colleagues to discuss the day, Dave could either spend 14 hours watching a door that never opens – or face a secret pursuit across the country.

As a private investigator, his job is both fascinating – and ruthlessly boring. In a role that involves covert cameras, listening devices and drones, a lot of it is also spent sitting and watching.

But it’s time well spent, as for the past 15 years Dave has been following cheating partners, tracing missing family members and investigating fraudulent employees and other ‘wrongdoers’.

Here, Dave shares four of his more memorable cases with Metro.

The disappearing dad

As part of his job Dave deals with a lot of estranged relatives, and one case sticks with him because of the cruelty with which an unwilling father abandoned his child.

Elena* got in touch with Dave’s company Reveal PI when Leo*, the man she had been seeing, seemed to disappear without a trace.

‘They had met online, and he had said all the right things. But when she became pregnant after a couple of months, he vanished; stopped answering her calls then changed his name and number,’ explains Dave.

‘We took on the job and tried to trace him, but quickly established he’d used a variety of names and phone numbers and everything he’d told Elena about himself had been fabricated. Whoever he’d said he was, didn’t exist.’

Dave knocked on doors, searched local databases and asked around for weeks. Success came when he found someone Leo had celebrated a birthday with. Armed with the date of birth, he examined the records of all the HMOs he’d lived at and found a current address.

After confirming the address through a surveillance operation, Dave passed the details to Elena’s solicitor.

‘She just wanted to fill in the blanks; make sure she had his name for the child’s birth certificate and claim any benefits she was entitled to,’ he adds.

‘It was a sad story. We felt like we were chasing a ghost. And in the end, he said he wanted nothing to do with the child.’

The family cases hit hard for Dave, but he also finds it hugely satisfying to bring desperate people answers – especially in the cases of cheating partners. ‘You would be surprised how many married people have whole secret families living just down the road from them’, he says.

‘But I do love it when I get answers for people who have been gaslit by their spouses for years. We get cases where the entire family have fallen out when one partner manipulates everyone.

‘They isolate them – tell them they are being paranoid, crazy. So when we get proof and they can give it to their family and prove those lies, it is really rewarding.’

The side hustle

Andy* contacted Reveal PI after he discovered that a trusted employee – a manager called Steven* who had been with him for more than a decade – had been stealing from his industrial cleaning business.

He claimed that Steven had been giving clients inflated quotes before offering them the same work on the side for a smaller amount. He would then order excess stock and come into the business on the weekend, fill up his van, take equipment from the office and the extra stock to service clients, pocketing the proceeds.

However, with Steven in charge of the CCTV, Andy had no way of proving it – and the cameras were pointing outwards, looking for external threats. So Dave and his team snuck into the business in the dead of night while rebooting the CCTV to cover their tracks.

‘We wanted to make sure that the evidence we had was bulletproof – showing theft of the products, as well as of the clients. So we took a box of stock off the racking, hid a 1.5mm lens covert camera inside, put the stock back and returned the box. Even if you picked it up, you wouldn’t see it,’ Dave says.

Sure enough, the cameras caught Steven in the act. Dave’s operatives then followed Steven and clear drone footage which the team took from afar captured him putting on his PPE outside businesses and spending hours inside. There was no way he could deny he was working there.

To make sure their case was as solid as possible, the team also followed him on his lunch breaks.

‘We would go into the chip shop wearing a 2mm pinhole camera, invisible to the naked eye, inside a button on a shirt or jacket, and listen to him talking on the phone about different jobs,’ explains Dave.

Cameras were also hidden inside backpacks, lap top bags and coffee cups, so operatives can change angles while the investigator watches the footage remotely feeding back through an earpiece. ‘This is common practice for us. We normally have three or four people on a job, one inside the building and two or three outside or in a nearby van, watching the footage and feeding back via an earpiece or WhatsApp about what we need the closest operative to do.’

After ten days the evidence was damning and Steven was called in for a disciplinary. He owned up straight away and was told to resign. Having caused a huge loss of earnings – and reputational damage – Dave estimates Steven’s shenanigans cost the business up to £200,000.

Meanwhile, Andy is trying to recoup some of the lost cash.

‘He had a large business but he’s not a billionaire,’ explains Dave. ‘He knows every staff member and every client, so Steven caused massive distrust for him. A company he has spent his life building has been abused and he had to totally change the way he operates. It had a huge emotional impact.’

Cheating the system

On a job for a council who wanted to find out the authenticity of one of their claimants,Dave was told about Daniel* who was claiming full benefits, received a long term disability pay out and had a live-in carer.

The man claimed to be paraplegic but the reality was that he was perfectly able to walk. His family, frustrated about his dishonesty shopped him in to the authorities.

Cue Dave, his cameras and another early start. On the first day of the operation, he sat outside the subject’s home and nothing happened. (On days like this he relies on podcasts, audio books and plenty of coffee to stay visually alert for hours on end.)

On day two, he watched as Daniel got into his car with his walking frame and Dave followed him but lost him in traffic. On the third day, the man hobbled out of his home, his carer put his frame in the car and they drove to a nearby city.

Following him to his arrival spot, Dave says: ‘I watched as he got out of the car completely unassisted and walked 40 meters, without the frame, in broad daylight. Not only did he not have a limp, he almost had a swagger.

‘When they returned home later that day, his carer opened the passenger door, got the frame out, helped him up the drive and he hobbled back into his property.’

Filming it all, Dave was confident the footage would be enough to incriminate Daniel at a court hearing scheduled later that month.

On the day, the man arrived in an electric wheelchair with his head lolling to the side on a cushioned support.

Dave remembers: ‘To see someone sit in court pretending they can’t even lift the weight of their own head and then to show the footage of them walking towards the camera was very satisfying.

‘Daniel had said he was paraplegic so the footage showed a clear unequivocal lie. It was clear he was lying to the judge and wasting everyone’s time.

‘There are people who legitimately claim disability and get absolutely grilled by the authorities, and there are other people taking the p***, claiming everything under the sun and getting away with stealing from the public purse.’

Daniel was charged with fraud, though Dave didn’t get an update on the conviction.

A double life

Around 40% of Dave’s cases relate to cheating and lying partners, so when multimillionaire business man Caleb* got in touch with him to ask if his younger girlfriend Maya* was honest about her background, Dave launched an investigation.

Maya was Polish, and claimed to come from a very poor rural area, so Caleb supported her financially and gave her money to send home to her family.

‘She was used to the finer things in life, Gucci bags, staying in five-star London hotels and a shopping budget of thousands a month. We watched her browsing in Harrods, living the life of Riley,’ Dave remembers.

Everything seemed normal, but when they followed Maya on a flight back to Poland, he discovered she wasn’t who she said she was.

‘In Poland she had a very nice, city centre apartment and an Audi. She would go out in the morning and go for bottomless brunch with the girls – relatively young, very affluent looking women.

‘But one day she got picked up by an S-class Mercedes with blacked out windows, was taken to a villa for exactly an hour before the car picked up and took her back home again.’

Dave knew that the change in her appearance during that time meant she ‘wasn’t having tea with her granny’.

‘She normally dressed quite casually but this time Maya had a really nice dress on. She was taken inside the house by a security officer and when she came back an hour later, her hair was noticeably ruffled, with the clip taken out.’

The same thing happened a few days later and Dave came to the realisation that Maya was secretly working as an escort.

Delivering the news to Caleb was difficult, he recalls. ‘It was quite shocking for me to see the extent to which she’d lied to him. His concern was that if she was sleeping with a lot of men, he might have caught something. And if she wasn’t honest about who she was, he could be compromised somehow or open himself up to blackmail.

‘His worst fear had come true and to see his face – that he’d been lied to – was hard,’ Dave adds.

‘He was a little heartbroken – but he put a brave face on it, telling me he was at least grateful to know the truth.’

*Names have been changed

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