20 years of Down Under Investigations, our top 5 highlights from the past 20 years!

In this episode we celebrate this significant milestone and talk about some of our favorite memories and files from 20 years in the industry! 

We cover:-

1- Process Serving
2- Repossession of Vehicles
3- Skip Tracing
4- Private Investigations 

Got a question for our podcast or do you need to contact Simon and the Down Under Investigations team? Simply email info@downunderinvestigations.com or call 1300849007 or check out www.downunderinvestigations.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi, welcome to the latest podcast episode of Down Under Investigations The Truth. We discuss all things private investigation, process, serving , skip tracing and surveillance. You'll hear all about legal issues, cutting edge techniques, latest news and accurate information about our exciting industry . Let's join our host, Simon. Happy

Speaker 2: 0:23

Birthday.

Speaker 3: 0:32

Hello. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are very excited about today's episode because today and this week, this month, we are celebrating 20 years of down under investigations. We have an exciting event coming up , uh, for some of our closest family, friends and clients and colleagues, and we are very excited about that. So we thought today's episode, we would talk about the top five moments Throughout the last 20 years, we've had some exciting files, we've had some great times, we've had some tough times, some tough files. We've worked through , um, some things we've had to face as a business, but we are very excited about the future and we are very grateful for everything we've been able to accomplish over the last , uh, 20 odd years. So , um, well, let's go, let's get cracking

Speaker 2: 1:26

Crack birthday .

Speaker 3: 1:37

So, as you may or may not be aware, there's many strings to the bow at down on investigations. There's process serving , there's skip tracing, there's private investigations, there's deck collection and repossessions. There's a lot that we do. There's a lot that our team does and we operate right across Australia, and it's very exciting that we've grown to this point. So these top five moments , uh, could be any , uh, state and , um, we're gonna try and cover one for each of the specific areas that we , uh, operate in. Um, just so that you can have a laugh and get an idea of , uh, some of the challenges, the great things we've , uh, been able to accomplish and overcome over the last few years. So, point number one, we're gonna talk about , uh, a repossession that we actually did. One of our team , uh, was an outback New South Wales repossession in the town of Dubbo. And one of our team arrived at this address to repossess the vehicle. We had a key, we knew where the car was, however, the car was behind locked gates. And legislation says we can't jump fences to cut bolts to repossess vehicles. No matter what paperwork you've got in order, you need a court order for that sort of thing. Um, it's only when it's on public land that , uh, we can take it. So if it was parked out the front of the address, we'd be able to repossess it without issue. Spoke to the driver of the vehicle behind the fence and she was evasive straight away . Didn't want anyone touching the car, wanted the car not returning it, not stuff you, you know, a few other words exchanged , uh, to in our direction. Uh, we tried to remain professional, so we contacted the local police. Police came out, they were not helpful at all. Um , often they're not. They see it as a civil matter and they want you to go get a court order and warned our agent, you go on their property, we're gonna have you done for trespassing. So what can we do? Um , uh, license and criminal charges aren't worth a file. Um, communicated this with the client. The client understood the situation and I said, well, we're going to stay on it. We're going to keep, keep an eye on it and we're gonna wait for a moment when we can get this vehicle when it's on some land that is applicable , um, to be able to repossess. So then we, we left the property. We thought, well, there's no point sitting out the front, she's never gonna leave. If we do that, there's no point harassing her. Um , she had made it pretty clear that she was not gonna cooperate, so let's just get away and keep an eye. The vehicle had GPS tracking on it. She was aware it had tracking, well, maybe she wasn't. Anyway, we took off and noticed the vehicle leave the address on the tracker. Um, if you know, country New South Wales, it's headed from Dubbo all the way around , uh, blue Mountains to Newcastle in New South Wales. And, you know, a couple of, I guess it's a couple of hundred kilometer journey. Um, got there, we've <laugh> sent a , dispatched our team to that area to see where she's parked. The vehicle up , um, arrived there just after she did. And the vehicle again was in a locked shed. She knew what she was doing. This lady, she was very aware that we were onto her and we were following her. And , uh, so she was locking, locking the vehicle up and making it difficult for us. Sometimes when this happens, and we do get police out there though, that police will , um, put some pressure on the , uh, driver of the vehicle to give the vehicle up. And that's, that's always good. Or just through our own presence and our own communication , um, we can convince the driver that it's in their best interest to avoid further costs and issues to just give the vehicle up as well. However, like I said, this one, she was not gonna budge. There was no , uh, negotiating. She , um, she actually contacted our client and was abusive and aggressive about what we were doing and , um, trying to throw all sorts of slurs and allegations, which didn't stick. 'cause our clients know us well, they know how we operate, and the stuff she was saying was just outrageous. So , uh, we continued to keep an eye on the vehicle over the course of days and even the coming weeks. Um, there was no point trying to box it in or block in the driveway, you know, that you can , we can't do those sorts of things, just a matter of waiting for the opportune time. Um, then a day later we noticed the vehicle had taken off again from that address and taken off back to Dubbo, you know, another couple of hundred Ks drive, and we thought, well, do we go back there and intercept? Let's just wait and see what happens. Again, the vehicle stopped at this one address. We knew if we went there middle of nowhere, it's gonna be behind these lock gates. She's already, you know, made it clear her intentions. So we didn't, didn't decide to go straight out there. We thought, well, let's just back off a bit, let her start moving around and driving around and wait for an opportune time where she's gone to maybe some shops or she's got a bit of a pattern happening , um, and her guard is a bit more down. So we did that. We, we backed off for a day or two and then noticed the car again, driving from Dubbo back to Newcastle this time. So she's done Dubbo to Newcastle, Newcastle back to Dubbo, Dubbo back to Newcastle. And through a series of searches and inquiries, we've actually ascertained that she was moving address. She was moving from the Dubbo address to Newcastle. She was relocating, so she was taking all her furniture each time, loading her car up and doing her run and then coming back and then doing another one. And this time, and we worked out also. She had family in the Newcastle area, so it was time to , uh, go and sit off that address a little bit and just see who she visited and what , what she did. Um, had a team waiting , uh, nearby as she took off from the address. And we, we didn't want a confrontation with her. She, we'd already had the confrontation, so there was no more negotiating, there was no more trying to convince her to give up the vehicle or anything like that. Um, so we did keep an eye on the tracker and we noticed that she was visiting a friend at an address. Turned up the address, it was behind lock gates. Again, no point confronting, no point causing an issue, especially with the attitude of the police in the area. They weren't gonna assist and we were warned. So we had to do things right and correct. So we did that. And then she left that address not long after and headed to a local medical facility. And at this medical facility, there was no locked gates, it was all wide open. Um, however, she parked in a 15 minute loading zone and we got our team out there as quick as we could. Our team actually saw her leaving the vehicle by, they got there just as she was walking inside the, we knew what she looked like, by the way, as she was walking inside this medical facility. And that's when our team pounced jumped in the vehicle, drove it away, got it out of her hands. Then we gave her a call and said, Hey, we have the vehicle and it's up to you what you wanna do with the key. It's gonna cost you, I think it was about $450 to rekey the entire car. If she didn't return the key, which would be added to her bill, and in her contract that we would've been chasing her for that money. Um, she decided that, yeah , the , the car was gone, there was nothing she could do now, and she was happy to give the key up as well. So we had a very happy client return the client, the car to the client's , uh, depot and it was a big job. It was a lot of kilometers and a lot of patience as well on our part. But thankfully at the end of the day, we did get a great result for that one. Another of our top five moments was something more recent, and there's been a recent development which has really helped us as far as AI and investigations go and using a tool called Google Lens. So Google Lens is basically like a search engine, but you can upload a photo or portions of a photograph to Google. Google will then scour the web and find matching colors, sizes, things to do with that. Um, that photo to be able to match, say a location or a person or people use it, like if they see a celebrity wearing a jacket, they can upload a photo of that celebrity, you know, sort of outline the jacket. Google lens will find that jacket. You'll be able to find prices where you can buy it, how much it's worth, all those sorts of things. Uh , the brand, the color, all , all of that. You can also do it with properties. So if you get the front of a property , um, you can use that, punch it into Google lens, the photo of that property, and Google Lens will search the internet , um, and scour for images that look very similar to that property. So, so , uh, lots of matching , um, like the landscaping or the color of the house or or style of the house. And as you know, there'd be millions and millions and millions of , uh, options when you do that sort of thing. However, you can also add search terms. So if you have the name of the suburb that you believe this house is in, that you are looking for, you can put the suburb in. So we had a file where we were looking for a male and he was , uh, from overseas and we knew he was moving a bit, and he put up a photo of himself on social media. Silly boy, we love social media because it gets us great results. As much as social media can be a real pain, sometimes if someone leaves their profile open, we can find information through photos. He put up a photo of, I think it was his little daughter on a little push bike . And behind her you could see the outline of this cabin. And it was a distinct cabin, a distinct color. However , obviously we had no idea what this cabin was or what it looked like. Fantastic. We punched it into Google lens . Uh , we knew the area he was in , um, and I mean, we can even narrow it just by country, you know, just type in Australia or, you know, localize the results a little bit. And it came up with a hit straight away . And it was an address, it was actually at a caravan park. And we determined just through , uh, mapping and a bit of research, which unit, which cabin number he was in at this caravan park. The day later we turned up and we served him. He'd only put up the photo 24 hours earlier, but it's, it was just such a great skip trace and such a great result. And often our clients will have no idea how we locate someone. And this is just a new way that we're doing things. We get asked often, how do you locate someone, you know, and I I , at the end of the day, how long is a piece of string? There is so many different ways we can locate an individual. It all depend on the information available and how hidden this person is, how much they put out there. And then also, is there people in their world that are willing to give you their address and under what circumstances would they give you their address or their work details or their phone number. So yeah, that was a real successful one using Google Lens to find this individual at the caravan park. Got him served and the client was extremely happy and , uh, we were able to move on. One of our other top five results was to do with the process, serving file. And it was a pretty straightforward file. Client came to this. They'd had other process servers, other companies trying to , uh, serve core papers on an individual. The individual lived in a high-rise apartment. We knew he lived there. He was certainly there all searches , databases, every inquiry led to him living in an apartment in this massive tower. And so we couldn't actually access the, the floor that he was on. It was all secure fobs and that sort of thing. There was also an underground carpark, which was secured again, I mean, you know, you could easily follow a car in there if you needed to. And we'd done that. We've ascertained where he was parked and and his vehicle, and we knew what he was driving. Uh, through a little bit of research, we also obtained some photographs of him. So we knew what we were looking for. We knew who he was, and we just decided, look, we just need to put two people on this job , uh, to get this guy served. And we did it one morning , uh, six 30, we arrived at the property. We thought, you know, generally he's not gonna leave before six 30. He was a businessman , um, working in the CBD , not exactly where I think he was moving from an appointment to appointment. Didn't have sort of a set office so we couldn't just turn up at an office to serve him. So we had to go to the home address. We printed two copies of the documents to serve on him. So we had one agent watching the lift and foer area with a photo of him, knew exactly what he looked like, and the other agent was downstairs at the entrance to the car park waiting for that vehicle to leave or move. So we would be able to serve him there. Um , and it was only a matter of time, maybe a matter of an hour, hour and a half, but a little bit of extra effort we had to go to , to get this guy served. Um , just being there early enough , being prepared and having a photograph, having his re Joe . And it ended up that he did go down in the lift to the car park . Our agent was nearby the car, saw him walking to the car, he started the car, and , um, agent went up and served him in the car park at his address. Happy days , he got him served and he was evasive. He was, he was not wanting to be served. But , um, yeah, you can run, you can't hide. And, you know, that's why we put in the extra work. We do early hours to get the results. We do the research so we know who we're dealing with and happy client that ended up being a long term and still is a client of ours. And that was the first job. They came to us with one of those difficult ones and for , as a result, got the result. And they're a happy ongoing client. Happy days. And one of the most satisfying skip trace jobs we've done, we've actually talked about on the podcast before, but we had a client come to us and he had not seen his dad his entire life. His dad lived , uh, in a town for years where this son was conceived and born and took off after that. And before he was even born, his dad had left town. So he never knew his dad, he knew his mom . His mom had minimal details. Um, and I'm not gonna go into the hows and whys of how that happened, but the mom had the name, the first name of the guy, and it wasn't that common a name, but it was, it was difficult enough that it was gonna be a bit of a search. And she had a little bit more information to go on to do with the defense force, which was quite helpful for us. So we had to search for this guy and we had to do a big background search to find, hey, what's this guy's surname? Who are we looking for? Find his real date of birth. She had an approximate date of birth, you know, a year how old she thought he was. Um, because when you've got a name, just a name, there's often many, many people, you've gotta , um, filter things down by finding certain details. Like his family, his surname, his his date of birth , um, addresses suburbs, towns , um, and expand it from there. So with this one, yeah, that's what happened. We, we searched and searched and we basically followed the trail from where this guy moved to town after town, city interstate into another state, back to the , the same state, but in a diff totally different area of the state in Victoria. Um, you know, started off in the western suburbs, ended up in , uh, out in Gippsland area, and we tracked him down. And by this stage our client was 40, obviously. Um, and the, the male that we had to make contact with was 65. So the best way we thought to do this was a bit sensitive because of the age of the gentleman, and we didn't wanna , obviously scare him off or spook him. So we spoke to the client once we located this, this gentleman, and we said, look, I think it's best, or we think it's best if you write a letter, explain what's happened , explain who you are, and put a couple of photographs in there. Even put some photographs of your own kids in there, because he will see himself in those photos. He will see, you know, the, the appearance and think, wow, you know, this is my family. And I , you know, it may tug on his heartstrings. He may want to connect even though he never has. And as a result , uh, we hand delivered this letter with the photos to the gentleman , and he didn't really respond at the time. We didn't wait around for a response, though, that wasn't what we were there to do. We had had all the contact details for our client, he was wanting to give them to this gentleman. Um, and we were 99.9% sure we had the right male or right , uh, father. Um, and then we didn't hear from the client for a period of time after we let him know, yep , it's been delivered. Two weeks later, he contacted us, said, Hey, he's contacted us. He's a little bit unsure, he's hesitant, but he does want to do at least a DNA test just before we make any, you know, big decisions on catching up and things like that. I said, well, that's great. So , um, they did do that. They had a DNA test organized. Um, they , um, the father was happy to pay for that as well. Um, he just didn't wanna get fleeced or scammed. Um, but the information, he, he was pretty certain that, you know, that he knew that this son was his son from the, the town and all the details, everything was lining up. And the DNA test came back for both of them, and it was a perfect match, as perfect as you can get. And so then they did catch up the , uh, client, the son then got introduced to other family members, to his sisters. He had two sisters, his sisters had kids, so he was an uncle to these, these , uh, kids as well. And it was just a great story where they did actually reunite really well. And for us that really tugged on the heartstrings. We love seeing families come together. The last thing we want is for people to be isolated and separate and for things to fester. But this was such a great result, and it is one of the highlights for us of the last 20 years of down under investigations. And the final , uh, I guess highlight or it was something pretty exciting. It actually wasn't a file, but it was a TikTok that we produced. Um, a couple of years back we produced a TikTok about cheating partners, the signs your partners cheating, something we've talked about on the podcast before, but just a simple , uh, TikTok that went for about 30 seconds. The thing went absolutely viral around the world. We had millions and millions of views, hundreds of thousands of likes. The thing just blew up. We don't know how or why. It was only produced by one of our team, not some social media expert. Um , just someone in our team , uh, clipped it together and thought, oh , that's pretty cool. Put this , uh, music with it. And it was, there was a pretty cool little video. Anyway, not only did it go viral on TikTok , it got picked up by news stations around the world. And we have found, even till now from this happening a couple of years ago, there's still news stories talking about this viral TikTok talking about the cheating partners, the signs your partners cheating, the red flags, blah, blah , blah, and quoting us and talking about down under investigations. And , uh, it's just really cool the , the worldwide reach just from one little TikTok . And , um, I guess for us, that's a bit of a highlight. It was a , it was pretty funny at the time. The other thing was, as a result, we did get a lot of spam calls, a lot of spam contact coming through our emails and through our phone lines. And , um, yeah, we did have to , uh, shut things down. Not , not shut down the business, but just shut down the avenues to make contact and have someone really monitoring that so that we weren't getting , uh, just dodgy, dodgy stuff , um, going on. But, you know, that's what happens when things go viral. Yes, it's exciting, but <laugh> , you know , on the other hand, it's , uh, it's not the best. Um, yeah, just, just silly, silly people ringing up and, and , uh, and being a abusive, even though I had no idea, they had no idea who we were or really what we do. It's just people just trying to be silly. But anyway, you can search for that TikTok or , you know, even search online down under investigations, you'll find all these news articles , um, from around the world in all different languages that , uh, talk about us and that TikTok and, and we thought it was just pretty funny. And , um, you know, I think for, for a week or two we were just like a bit blown away with just the reach on that thing. So anyway, I hope you've really enjoyed, you know, the last , uh, this podcast and us talking about the last 20 years. Just these five little, you know, highlights. Um, I mean, we've got many, many highlights. These are just a couple that we thought we'd talk about today. Um, you know, happy birthday to us, we're very excited and very , um, uh, just, just blessed. We really feel really blessed and privileged to be in the position we're in , um, growing a great business, but also helping people. 'cause that's what we want to do at the end of the day. Whether that's helping people get their documents served, progress through the courts, or get money recovered, or find out that their partner's cheating or find that long lost loved one, you know, that they haven't seen or have never seen , um, for forever or a very long time. That's what it's about for us. It's about helping people and , um, we love what we get to do. So on behalf of our team, we'd like to wish ourselves a very happy 20th day . Happy , great day . Have a great day.

Speaker 1: 23:23

Thanks for listening. To get in touch with the team at Down Under Investigation, check out our website@downunderinvestigations.com or call 1 308 4 9 0 0 7 or email info@downunderinvestigations.com.