Private investigators offer numerous services, in a huge number of domains such as corporate and star safety, pre-employment verification; subject to perceived value background search. These are only the tip of the iceberg of what they do! They can also do investigations regarding crimes made given the computer, like illegal downloading, copyrighted materials and numerous others.

An alternative field that they get into is finding missing persons or finding the birth fathers of adopted children, child custody and shelter cases. Sometimes they are hired to prove if a spouse has committed an infidelity which is the majority of the cases that the private investigators are hired to do.

Tasks that a real private investigator does

Private investigators are trained to do surveillance. This is a basic skill that they must have. More often than not, they are required to observe a location or a person from a well-guarded or concealed site such as a car or sometimes bushes or trees. To do these kinds of private investigation jobs, they need special equipment such as binoculars, cameras, or photo cameras. These are all used to obtain the evidence needed for the job they are contracted to do.

They must also know how to use the computers to store the collected evidences into the databases so that these information can be organised and retrieved later on.

When taking on private investigation jobs, the private investigator only answers to their consumers whom they are doing all the investigative work for. All the information collected during the tasks are only presented to their client or their contractor.

Private investigators tend to specialize in specific fields. There are three main broad types : economic, corporate and legal work.To become a specialist in this pasture they have to study and focus all their energy into simply this meadow. For instance a legal investigator specializes himself in civil law or penal law depending on the branch of law they like.

Economical or financial investigators

They tend to specialize themselves in some specific fields such as certified public accountants or CPAs.

Corporate investigators

They conduct both external and internal investigations in a corporation. For internal investigations, the staff are involved. Checks are performed to find out who is definitely stealing or performing illegal activities on the company premises. In external investigations, they have to prevent any sort of crime from the outside, which is usually in regards to outside theft of corporate assets (eg. intellectual property).

Legal investigators

They are employed by a lawyer or a law firm to help them on specific cases to interview witnesses or to gather up evidence to build a case.

Varied type of jobs that private investigators take on, will pay differently. Private investigation jobs often differ in quite a few aspects. Besides, it is more common to find that the richer the client, the higher the pay!