What is the success rate of surveillance?

When speaking to a new client, the question is often asked “How successful will the surveillance be”?  Another question we regularly get asked is “What is the success rate”? These are good questions and quite often asked, understandably because the client does not want to waste their money on an unsuccessful days surveillance.

Unfortunately we can’t give an accurate answer due to a number of factors such as it being the wrong day, the wrong time, wrong information and occurances out of our control. Lets break that down and I will explain a bit better for you.

Targeting the best day for a sucessful surveillance

When a prospective client calls asking for surveillance we will always ask what is the background to the suspicions, if it’s matrimonial, do they have any idea who the other person is and is there a pattern, such as specific days that they believe any wrong doings are being carried out?  This is so we can target days and times that surveillance should be carried out that are going to have more chance of being lucrative and not shooting from the hip and going on a day when nothing is likely to happen.

If the client does not know what days are likely to be succesful we will discuss a plan of action to obtain intelligence to target the correct days for surveillance to take place. At M.R.Investigations, we take pride in our work and we want to get you the best result possible for your money.

Wrong information.

Quite often especially with instructing employers, they will be acting on information received. Such as another employee has mentioned that another employee that is off from work sick is working elsewhere. In our experience these tip-offs are usually correct but on some occasions the information can be wrong and just be a suspicion or in a matrimonial situation a partner may decide that their other halfs actions are suspicious but turn out to be perfectly innocent.

Can the surveillance go wrong?

Usually the surveillance does not go wrong and comes to a succesful conclusion. However,  surveillance can go wrong for any number of reasons beyond our control. It could be that the subject of enquiry drives at great speed, jumps red lights or other illegal manouvres which not only means there is great risk of compromise if we were to mirror these illegal manouvres but we would also have to be driving illegally which we will not do. There could be that the subject of enquiry manages to get past a bus and that bus then stops suddenly, preventing the operatives maintaing a visual on to the vehicle we are following and is lost from view.

We have a saying “There’s surveillance teams that have losses and surveillance teams that tell lies.” Basically if someone tells you they never have a loss they are lying. However, all is not lost, apart from physical surveillance we can use technical surveillance to assist us making a recovery of the operation such as GPS trackers.