Archive for the ‘Research Methods’ Category

In tip #1 of Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women I mentioned one free people finder site and the wildcard tool that can bypass the last name requirement — most helpful in locating women who are probate beneficiaries, potential witnesses in a legal matter or the birth mother of someone relinquished for adoption long ago.

There are many Internet sites for identifying current last names of women — searching by first name only — for whom the investigator may only have a birth name or former married name. Each site returns different results so you’ll want to use more than one, if at first you don’t find what you’re looking for.

At the site, classmates.com, I performed a similar search to the one I did in tip #1, except that there’s no field to restrict the results by year of birth or full birthdate. In that case, I entered just the first name and a state. The results give last names and birth names and the name of the school with the attendance years. You can use this to narrow the birth year. The tip #1 search site returned 17 matches. I supplied first name, age and state. Classmates returned 67 matches associated with first name and state. Very few of these matched the age of the subject, based on the listed graduation years. It’s a limited source but still supplements other sites.

Do you have a favorite website or database that allows searching by first name?

Anyone who finds people for a living, as private investigators do, knows the frustration of locating women. They change their names. Often many times over the course of their lives. This is a challenge to the heir finder who has a name from many years in the past that she has to update in order to locate her subject.

Use the free portion of a people finder site that allows you to search by first name and date of birth. But you also have to use a workaround on sites that require a last name to perform the search. This involves the handy wildcard. In this case, we’ll apply the asterisk.

At the site peoplefinders.com enter a first name in that field and an asterisk (*) in the last name field. Add date of birth or year of birth. This will work until the search interface is changed — which may happen just as soon as the powers that be see this tip!

That’s tip #1 in Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women. Do you know of other sites where a skip trace by first name can be performed?

I did have one techie admit that he learned something new at the presentation I did for the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Their Sunny Climate Seminar is held every year in Hawaii, very painful…

Almost as soon as I minted my PowerPoint, So You Think You Know Google? (see an edited version), Google released design changes to Google Maps and added a new feature, SearchWiki, to Web search. SearchWiki — a search results comment feature that can be public or private — is potentially an investigative tool to see what people are saying about incidents and people and companies in the news. But SearchWiki may die before much of a database of comments develops because the addition has been fairly negatively received. Read more about this at Internet News. In a trial search example, enter “searchwiki” in the Google search box then scroll to the bottom of the search results page. Click on “All notes for this SearchWiki” and start reading the comments by selecting the link under the URL of each search result.

There are other blogs that are featuring screenshots and discussing all the new features on Google Maps Street View, but one feature improvement stood out to me — the revamped 360 degree rotate. Now, in the Street View image just hold your mouse button on the “N” on the circular dial as you move around the circle to get smoother, more incremental views of the street scene. An addition that I’ve long wished for has been added, although it’s not as seamless as the new panorama rotate, the “look up”/”look down” function. Remember zooming to get a good shot of a street address only to have it disappear from view? Now you can zoom, then elevate or lower the view for the enjoyment of a tall building (but no simulated scaling of the building) or to get a closer glance at the part of the frame that disappeared in the older Street View version.

One last Google note for those of you who use gmail. You no longer need fear a panic attack on the discovery that your email account has been swallowed by the cybermonster. Thanks to Inter Alia for the pointer to Gmail Backup.

Background Screening and Investigations: Managing Hiring Risk from the HR and Security Perspectives is a wide-ranging guide to the technology, resources, policies and procedures, and trends in employment screening. A road map for Human Resource decision makers who are screening potential hires and current employees or who are evaluating outside background screening companies, Background Screening and Investigations adds depth to the extensive topics covered, without being overly technical.

The target audience is primarily the employer businesses, not the providers of background check services. Private investigators just getting into the background screening business or those smaller providers who want to brush up on recommended practices and the trends in the industry will also find this a valuable guide. Also, the findings from surveys of the screening practices and objectives of employers is essential for anyone who wants to offer a responsive screening service.

Sandwiched within the essays by over a dozen specialists in the legal, standards setting and metrics, service provider and security/risk analysis arenas are short-hand chapter highlights, and summaries from the differing perspectives of those in human resources and workplace security. There’s a lot here.

Background Screening and Investigations helps employers think through setting screening policies and practices and whether to outsource, as the vast majority do. Niche services and the expected components of a thorough background screening process have expanded with innovations in data collection. This book describes and evaluates the value of various services — those that are standard and others that are not as regularly employed — such as identity verification, drug testing, reference checks, hand-checks of court records and international screening. With the proliferation of resellers of aggregated electronic criminal records the public and employers may be lulled by the myth of a national criminal records database. There is no substitute — in either comprehensiveness or accuracy — for examining the criminal records index at the courthouse.

The legal mandates for employers and background screening agencies are sufficiently complex that you’ll want to peruse this guide for pre and post hire tips.

Review the Table of Contents and first chapter.

Sign up for The Background Buzz newsletter to receive news of current events in pre-employment.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project report, Teens and Social Media, supports the continuing importance of the Internet for due diligence, background, employment and skip tracing investigations, as well as, reputation research and even surveillance for legal and insurance matters.

Some 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction – a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.

39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.

33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).

28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.

27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.

In short, most teens are using the Internet and over a quarter of them have Web pages or blogs and even more post photos. Also, commentary by teens can be mined for information on their parents – who may be jurors, experts, plaintiffs, defendants, claimants or witnesses – for background, employment, insurance or locate investigations.

Previously, I wrote about the increasing reliance by employers on Internet research.

In my conference presentations, I give examples of my Internet research that uncovered photographs, identified current employment and personal and business involvements of subjects. At the Annual Meeting of the California Bar, Carole Levitt and I presented, Social Networking Sites: The Newest Investigative Tool On The Internet. Carole cited a University of Wisconsin analysis that found teens limit the personal identifiers they post online. It’s essential in constructing your search queries to know that “40 percent of the profiles included the youth’s first name, and about 9 percent included their full name.” To be effective, the researcher should combine first name with other personal identifiers commonly used at that particular social networking site.

Many online court case name lookups also have document images. Some court indexes, as in the one provided by Alameda County, California, only have search and retrieval of documents by case number.

The Sacramento County Court Case Management System (CCMS) provides access to case file documents for recently filed Civil and Probate cases.

You can view all documents on Trust and Estate cases initiated after February 5, 2007 as well as all Probate Notes for hearings after February 5, 2007. You can view all documents on Civil cases (excluding Small Claims and Unlawful Detainer cases) for cases initiated after November 13, 2007 as well as Case Management Program Tentative Rulings for hearings after November 13, 2007.

It’s not as seamless as it should be. Ideally, you could conduct a name search in the Sacramento Court Name Index System to retrieve a case number and links to the documents. But the current setup requires searching in two steps, if you are searching by name and then want to get the case documents.

View the tutorial by selecting the orange and blue figures in the lower right corner of the image. Then you’ll be directed to the Slideshare site. Look at the full screen slideshow by selecting “Full” in the lower right corner of the image.

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What are the parameters at your local court Web site for viewing document images online?