30 Unexpected Things People Discovered When They Hired A Private Investigator, As Shared By People Online

Hadn't heard from my mom since I was about 15 (very unstable due to drugs n alcohol etc) ... When I was 29 I decided it was time to find out what happened to her. I figured if she was a Jane Doe somewhere then I could put her to rest, and if she was alive then I wanted to let her know that I forgave her. Hired a PI to help... I guess she was moved by my story and so she also ran info for the man my mother was apparently married to (on the house) ... And with one clue from his report I was able to track them down. I wouldn't have found my mom (alive and was just starting out on recovery after being homeless and addicted for many many years) if it wasn't for the PI who kindly ran an extra report for free. (Mom has remained sober now for about 7 years and is probably the healthiest she's ever been, physically and emotionally).

I know someone that hired a pet detective to find their cat and he f****n found him.

Not me, but a friend hired one because he was suspicious his stepdad was being unfaithful to his mom. So, he asked me, and I put him in contact with a guy I knew.

Bit of a backstory, the stepdad is 5’10”, 160ish pounds. My friend is 6’2” 235 pounds, ripped. At 15, when my friend’s mom and stepdad started dating, my friend gave the the typical “you hurt her, you’re dead” speech. Also his bio dad walked out on him and his sister when my friend was like 4. It took a while, but my friend warmed up to the guy and he’s a good guy (took my friend and I to an 49ers game once which was pretty cool).

Anyways, the PI said he wasn’t cheating. Apparently there was a house on the market that my friend’s mom wanted, and he bought it. He had been remodeling it for some time and he kept it a secret. As a 5-year anniversary gift to her, he bought it. Anyways, they live in a five-bed house now.

My mother's dad walked out on mom, my aunt, and my grandmother when mom was just 5. A few years later, my grandmother died of a grand mal seizure. Mom was taken in by her grandparents, but she always wondered why her dad left and what became of him. In her 40's, she saved up a bit and hired a PI to track him down. Turns out he moved over time from Pittsburg to California where he wound up in prison for armed robbery and so e other violent crimes. He died in San Quentin penitentiary.

I think mom got a lot of closure out of that. She was able to see that life would have most likely been even worse had he stayed. At least living with her grandparents, she was loved and raised to fulfill her potential.

I have a story about private investigators doing a hilariously s**t job.

So, years ago, my brother injured his back at work because of his employer's unsafe work practices. During the ensuing suit, my brother's lawyer was given a folder full of documents from the employer's team. Turns out, they had hired a PI to investigate my brother to prove that his injury was faked. Well, unfortunately, the PI had been taking pictures of ME, operating an ATV mounted leaf hopper. My brother walked into the court hearing and watched the color drain from the opposing lawyers' faces when he introduced himself, looking nothing like me.

I was the recipient of a PI. I came home from work one day and my bf asked to have my engagement ring as he wanted to take it to be professionally cleaned. The second he handed it over he accused me of cheating on him. The conversation went back and forth for ages. I was beside myself, I couldn’t believe what he was saying and he would not believe I was innocent.
He then told me he’d had me followed for six weeks by a PI who had seen me get into a red mini. It was a girl I knew giving me a lift to work but he would not believe me. I knew then it was over and packed my things and left. I told him to get in touch with the PI and have another look at this so called evidence that I was cheating. An hour later he turns up at where I was staying begging to have me back. He’d realised his mistake. There was no way I was going to get back with someone who would behave that way though so we parted ways.

My grandmothers first "boyfriend" after my grandfather died said he was a retired cop and a veteran. They enjoyed dancing to country music together, and bought a new car, in her name though, even though she can't drive anymore.

My uncles hired a PI. Turns out, that old bastard had a habit of shacking up with widows and bleeding them dry. (The boyfriend not the PI).

My parents hired a private investigator to find out who my online bf was when I was 13.

The PI came back and told us he was just a fat a*s 13 yo... lmfao

In his twenties, my SO hired a PI to find out what had become of the childhood bully who had made his life hell, and who had vowed to kill him. Actually, he *did* try by bringing a loaded gun to school, but some other kid ratted him out & the bully got expelled—but still lived in the neighborhood for a few more years & beat up my SO every chance he got.

The PI found the bully living in a town more than an hour outside the big city, in a dead-end job. He’d been arrested for assault and public drunkenness a couple times.

That info helped my SO get past his fear that the guy would find him some day & make good on his threat.

My sister (mid 30s) is adopted and hired one to find her estranged biological father.

They came back saying that not only was he still alive and nearby, but he had a daughter. Meaning she also had a biological sibling!

Further digging from the PI uncovered that they weren't just similar ages either, they were exactly the same age. The evidence suggested that my sister had a twin and her birth father had taken the twin and vanished.

Huge, life-changing news.

Eventually, through more incredible detective work, the PI realised that the daughter was actually just my sister. There was no other sibling and they had just been investigating my sister the whole time accidentally. Needless to say, we asked for the money back.

TL;DR: Sister hired a private investigator, private investigator accidentally investigated sister.

I was a private investigator for a little bit. Most work PIs do is searching financial/court records and serving documents. But one time I was paid by wealthy parents to stake out their college senior who had stopped returning their calls. They were worried about her. These parents paid like $40k for round the clock monitoring just to find out their daughter dropped out of school and was a full time ski bum.

Btw stakeouts are mostly just sitting in your car reading all day

Not me, but my Grandfathers first wife.

Buckle in..

I live in New Zealand and this happened about 15 years ago when I was a young teen.

My Grandfather (Geoff), his wife and my grandmother (Mary), and their two children (their son Patrick my mum Ella), moved to NZ from Canada in 1986.
When living in Canada they owned a large and very beautiful Inn. It was often used as the place to stay/visit by famous people and dignitaries. There's even a photo of my grandparents with a baby Justin Trudeau and his father.
They ran this Inn for a number of years and raised their young kids whom they adopted in the early 70s.

Geoff and Mary were white folk, their children were not. It was very scandalous at the time.

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Geoff was born in England and fought in WW2. RBAF.

He moved to Canada immediately after the war and met my grandmother Mary some time after. He was 27 years her senior.

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Back in Canada the family split their time between the Inn during summer, and then lived in Fort Myers FL during the Canadian winters. This carried on for 13 or 14 years until, suddenly and seemingly one day out of the blue, he called the family into the main hall of their inn, sat everyone down and explained that they would be selling everything and moving to Nelson NZ.

Two weeks later, they were on a plane and on their way over.

Geoff buys a couple of furniture business and a movie theater and some property.

Five or six years after their move, their son Patrick heads to University in Dunedin and their daughter Ella moves out but remains in Nelson. Geoff decides he wants a divorce from Mary and they head their separate ways.

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Fast forward to 2003

Geoff, Mary, and Ella have been living in Christchurch separately. Geoff has been remarried twice, and Mary has been remarried once - both since divorced.
Ella now has her own child (me) and life is seemingly normal.

Geoff and Mary have both independently lost any businesses or money they ever had and would now be considered middle class.

Geoff decides he'd like to rekindle his relationship with Mary as it would make financial sense. Mary agrees and they start looking for a nice new home to buy. Geoff explains that he had been declared bankrupt a number of times by this point so he decides it's best if the house is purchased by Mary. She agrees and secures a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood.

I move in to the new house but at this stage Geoff is still tidying up his own estate and hasn't yet moved in.

He comes over one day after I've finished school to talk to both Mary and myself (note: my mum Ella was working out of town hence me moving in with them for a while).

Geoff explains that a week ago, a PI called him to tell him that there was a woman in England searching for him. They confirmed that he was the right man she was looking for and the PI explained that it was only by chance that he managed to trace him from England to Christchurch.

The woman searching for him was his LONG LOST DAUGHTER from his FIRST MARRIAGE during the war.

So, it turns out Geoff had a fling with a woman during the war, she got pregnant, they got married, he was deployed and fought (something happened?) and Geoff was assumed DEAD. Geoff didn't die, he moved to Canada - same name, no real attempt to hide his identity ever.

The PI found him, the lost daughter (Jen) got in touch, they spoke, he then reached out to his first wife (Karen) and bought them plane tickets to NZ.

Jen and Karen stayed for a week. The Jen lived in England, the Karen lived in Alabama. Jen returned home after a week. Karen did not.

Geoff pulled pin on moving in with my Mary as he had originally planned, told her that he was going to remarry his first wife Karen. Geoff asked for Mary for her original engagement ring so that he could give it to Karen. Mary reluctantly agreed on the condition that the engagement ring would be left to me when Geoff died. He agreed and have Karen the ring and they got married.

Geoff and Karen bought an expensive house in a fancy neighborhood and they built an even fancier second house in an even fancier neighborhood. Karen convinced him that we the family were trying to pull him away from her and tried she tried to alienate us from him.

One year later Geoff got extremely old and sick and shortly after his diagnosis, he died.
Before he died, Karen wrote us all out of the Will.

The second day after his death, Karen sold all of his belongings without our knowledge.
The 5th day after he died, Karen got on a plane and went back to Alabama, never to be heard from again. She left with the ring which was the only thing in the Will that was left to me.
We only heard from the long lost daughter Jen again about 5 years after Geoff's death, when she herself was dying.

Karen wasn't even here for the funeral and she left with all the money he had hidden in trust funds over the years or from the sales of their properties.

Karen died in 2010. She was buried with my ring.

My grandma Mary, who is still alive, has never been able to get over this.

My mum Ella killed herself 18 months ago.

This is the story of how someone hired a PI and it unravelled our family.

Geoff was great - he was definitely into some shady s**t but he was the only male role model I had growing up. He loved me like I was the most precious thing in the world. He treated me better than he ever treated his own kids and I miss him often. But there are so many holes and small details missing from this story that my heart aches for a chance to get the full story out of him.

To this day I still wonder what the motive was for Jen and Karen trying to find him... Jen and Karen barely spoke to each other after their one week stay here in NZ when Karen decided to live in NZ and remarry her first husband Geoff. What did they fight about I wonder.

Nearly everyone in this story is dead now so I guess I'll never know.. or maybe I could hire my own PI.

EDIT: Wooooooweee thanks for the awards kind redditors. Who needs a ring when I have gold and hugs. Chuffed!!

EDIT 2: Added names and words for easier reading.

Not mine specifically, but my mother hired one to spy on the school. See, my little brother is dyslexic and has severe social anxiety, and so was struggling a lot in a public school setting. He had an IEP, which the teachers and principal were insisting was being followed. But everyday my brother would come home in tears shaking because he felt abandoned and stupid.

So mom hired the investigator, and sure enough the teachers were basically just ignoring my brother. They'd sit him in the back of the room and demand he do his work, then wouldn't help him through it. Then they'd yell at him because he didn't do it (again, he couldn't write because of the dyslexia).

With all the evidence, my mom was able to arrange a meeting with the school board and threatened to sue. They agreed to pay his tuition for a private school that was supposed to help. It didn't, and mom ended up just pulling him out and homeschooling him. He's been doing a lot better.

My mom's best friend. She divorced her husband and was awarded full custody of their daughter. His family was a s**t-show.

He kidnapped his daughter, and he and his parents just disappeared. (This was easier in 1977 than it is now.)

She tried hiring a PI, but couldn't afford one.

So she started learning how to trace people on her own. In the days before the Internet.

She spent years doing this whenever she wasn't waitressing.

She did find her daughter in ''81, but by this time her daughter was poisoned against her.

Mom's friend went on to get her PI license, and was a PI specializing in woman's issues for the next two decades.

I dont know what happened to her after that. If she's alive, she would be in her '80s I think.

Edit:
Thank you for the upvotes everyone. There's a couple of common questions that people are asking about this.

1. Did mom and daughter reconcile? I asked my mother about that. She lost contact with her friend when mom left Texas over 20 years ago. The last she knew, no. They never reconciled. They communicated. That's it.

2. What about the police? As I explained to another comment, it was different in the 70's. Unlike now, it was easy to assume a new identity, and easy to "get lost". It was hard to find people who didn't want to be found. The most popular method of assuming a new identity became a plot point in the 1986 movie "Highlander".

- Police usually considered kidnapping by a spouse to be a "civil manner" to be handled by the courts. It was low priority for the police.

- Amber alerts weren't a thing until 1996. Before that were just milk cartons with pictures of kids on them.

Edit:
Amber alerts started in 1996. Before that, there were several other ways to highlight missing kids. Adam Walsh was famous. Kids appeared on television - often after the show "America's Most Wanted".

I had a girlfriend that worked for one for a while. She said that the majority of their work was insurance scams. She took a lot of pictures of guys who said they were hurt on the job playing golf and surfing and such.

My boyfriend’s family hired a PI to do some covert geneology, because they’re white but all have thick wiry hair that only black hairdressers can handle. And because there are things older folks in these parts Just Don’t Talk About.

Turns out there’s a fair amount of Lumbee Indian (a community founded by disenfranchised Native Americans and escaped slaves back in the day) in boyfriend’s family, which explains the hair.

Had a babysitter we thought was stealing from us, luckily our neighbor was a PI couple and they ran a background check for $10. Babysitter had a string of DUIs and a few days before a large fine was due, my camera disappeared. He also stole money from my kids piggy banks.

He sort of disappeared but was also really into Instagram so I surreptitiously followed him. He started babysitting again for a single mom (easy target) and posted a lot of ‘fun’ pics with this family. I tracked down the mom and sent her a long email detailing out his whole scam. She said we were right and it was clear he’d been stealing from her business.

He has since gone underground but I still Google him regularly to see what he’s up to. He’s been able to avoid arrests for a while now.

When I met my wife, she seemed to have a normal modern family. Two moms, two dads. Over time it became apparent her step-dad wasn’t around much. Holidays, birthdays, you name it, he’d pop in to say hi, grab a nap, whatever, then take off again. My wife’s family thought this was normal, just the way it had always been since they were teenagers. He claimed to have a job following FedEx trucks around the state to prevent theft and drug trafficking. But I thought it strange and started making jokes about him having another family.

Well, I guess it got my sister in law thinking because she gets a favor from the PI at her law firm. Sure enough, he has not two but THREE wives around the state, and five other (step)children between them. My sister-in-law breaks the news to her mother who immediately changes the locks and files for divorce. They never speak again. Cold Turkey. Divorce is even uncontested. As a FU they also send the report to his other wives.

Edit:
I thought I was late to the thread so I wasn't expecting as many reactions. Thanks for the gold! To answer some of the questions. Yes, polygamy is illegal but it's not really worth prosecuting except to make an example of people. I don't know if my MIL was his first wife or not. I do know that one of the wives had been married and divorced him between their marriage. How does it happen? Counties don't exactly share marriage certificates. His families were pretty far from each other.. Was their wedding legal? No idea, IANAL. Probably the separation was just a formality for paperwork purposes which is why it went to court, why it went uncontested and why he never showed up again. I think he reached out once or twice but she never answered the phone. And if he ever showed up again, we weren't told about it. My MIL is a strong independent woman of faith who just "didn't know". He fooled his step daughters for 15 years too.

I used to work for an insurance defense firm years ago. Best PI story I have is where we hired one to tail a guy who was suing our client for an injury that wasn’t entirely our client’s fault. The guy was refusing to settle, and was insisting on going to trial even though we offered a fair sum that would’ve paid his medical bills. The PI we hired got some good pics that showed the plaintiff was nowhere near as “injured” as he claimed, but the crown jewel of the photos was one where the guy was walking on a pier with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Had his hand on her a*s and everything.

Later in a deposition, the attorney slid the picture to the plaintiff and said something like “Mr. Smith (obviously not his real name), who is the woman in this picture? We would like to schedule a deposition with her as well.” The guy went ghost white and told his attorney he wanted to settle.

At least he was smart enough to realize that if his wife found out the other woman was gonna be deposed, he was gonna have to get a family law attorney as well, because the divorce papers would soon follow.

EDIT: Wow, this blew up overnight! To clarify some points in the comments, no, this is not technically blackmail. Our firm had the PI follow him to see if he was faking his injuries, which is standard operating procedure, not to see if he was cheating on his wife (we had no idea he was doing that). The fact the woman in the picture was his mistress was irrelevant. The attorney would have asked for the person's contact info even if she were just a friend, coworker, cousin, or whatever. The attorney wanted to depose her to ascertain the extent of the guy's injuries. At no point did the attorney say "drop the suit or we'll out your affair to your wife."

Not me but my grandfather did.

He was separated from his brother when the Japanese occupied China. My grandfather safely made it to Hong Kong and eventually to Canada. His brother made it to Singapore or Malaysia according to family friends back then. So my grandfather spent a good 5 years or so working with a PI to find his brother so they can be reunited. Sadly, with just a picture and the fact many people died in the war, it wasn’t much to go on. My grandfather is still alive and always thinks of his brother. It’s his wish to see him one more time.

Edit: Provided response in thread below and copied here.

Wow thank you everyone for the kind wishes and suggestions.

To let you know- my grandfather worked with this PI many years ago, say between 1999- 2004ish? And maybe a few touch points here and there in the years after. My grandfather was disheartened because he made many trips to Asia over the years thinking “this is it”. But it just cost more money and got his hopes up. No clue if the brother married, if he even made it to Singapore or Malaysia (or it can be even outside of Asia all together). Not even sure if he’s alive. He would be in his late 80s now (estimated). He has not spoken about it directly with me, just with my mom (his daughter). If I’m being honest, we haven’t exactly encouraged him to continue the search either. All my aunts and uncles tell him to move on, and enjoy his time in peace rather than in constant yearning. I don’t have the status in the family to overstep my mom and her siblings and start bringing up the past and asking him to consider a DNA kit. If I do, I’d have to do it in secret and consider the emotional investment my grandfather may make.

He’s not living unhappily by any means- he has a great life and quite accomplished with raising 6 kids to have families/homes of their own. We each take care of him. He has tons of friends, likes to cook, use WeChat to talk to anyone and everyone, travel (precovid) and read. He does want to see his brother, but as time goes by the memory and drive becomes more faint and eventually the day-to-day life just makes it easier for him to accept the circumstances.