Crime Time Publishing Co., Inc.

Website Links

Description

GLB ACT IS 10 YEARS OLD! NEW LEGISLATIVE THREAT LOOMS! By Robert Scott, P.I. The single most influential piece of legislation to affect the private investigation industry is 10 years old. The GLB Act was enacted Nov 12, 1999 and vital data that is so crucial to the work private investigators do was saved. For those of you who have been in the business less than 10 years, let me try to explain (in short) what this is about: First, "GLB" stands for Gramm, Leach, Bliley -- the authors of the bill. Prior to the passage of the GLB act, there were a number of pieces of proposed legislation in congress to outlaw access to credit header data. If you didn't know, credit header data is the foundation of virtually all people search data. At the time, largely through the efforts of NCISS (our industry's main lobby group in Washington), a compromise was reached that allowed continued access to credit header data under the condition of certain regulations to assure appropriate use of the data. When you run a search at a data website today and have to choose the "intended use" or "permissible purpose", this directly relates to the GLB act and the regulations put in place to keep the data available. The full GLB act is a wide ranging and complex piece of legislation that affected many different industries. This was just a small part of it. For full details on the entire act, here's the Wikipedia link . Now comes word that there is a new threat in Washington -- HR 3306, "The Social Security Number Privacy and Identity Theft Act" that AGAIN tries to ban our access to this data. If you want to join the fight, one way is to make a contribution to the legislation fund at NCISS. The money supports lobbying efforts in Washington to get our side of the story out. Their website is NCISS.org if you want more information. Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book." Reprint permission. NYPD SECRET CELL PHONE DATABASE REVEALED By Robert Scott, P.I. Press reports in the NY Daily news and elsewhere have revealed that the NYPD is building a phone number database from a very unique source -- 911 calls. Utilizing data collected as far back as 2003, details on over 20 million 911 calls are already on file. Of particular value to police investigators are calls that came in from prepaid or disposable cell phones. Traditionally, the carriers for these types of phones have no registrant name or address information on file. Now, if the phone has previously been used to make a 911 call, an address can be linked to the phone number. An unnamed police source said the system already resulted in the arrest of a serial burglary suspect who had left a slip of paper with his prepaid cell phone number behind at crime scene. Previously, he had been assaulted and called 911 -- placing the prepaid phone number and his home address in this special phone database! INVESTIGATION OF PREPAID CELL PHONES By Robert Scott, P.I. Prepaid cell phones present a vexing challenge to investigators, cops and skiptracers. For around thirty bucks, an anonymous dial tone can be obtained. No name is required. No I.D. check. No billing information. No questions asked. Just walk into Walmart or any other outlet that sells prepaid cell phones and you’ll walk out with a working phone line that’s virtually impossible to trace. If you’re a bad guy in the crime business, this is a good thing. If your job is tracking down bad guys, it’s a bad thing. Did you know that phone company identifier searches at phonevalidator.com and fonefinder.net and similar searches elsewhere don’t identify most prepaid cell phones? These searches are based on telephone company records called NPA/NXX data. NPA/NXX data identifies the owner of blocks of phone numbers. But in the case of most prepaid phone services, their phone numbers are purchased or leased from traditional cell phone companies that are listed in the NPA/NXX records. For example, Tracfone leases service from several different cell carriers. So, you could run a phone number and it could come back as a Verizon phone through NPA/NXX data when in fact it’s a prepaid Tracfone. Likewise, prepaid service Boost Mobile could come back as Sprint or Nextel. The exception to this is MetroPCS and Cricket prepaid phones, which usually come up under their own names. I recently put out posts on investigative listserves asking for phone numbers that were absolutely, positively known to be for prepaid cell phones. The phone numbers were then ran through NPA/NXX data to see how they would come up. Here are the results: Tracfone comes up as Verizon or T-Mobile or Cingular Boost Mobile comes up as Sprint or Nextel Go Phone comes up as AT&T T-Mobile To Go comes up as T-Mobile MetroPCS comes up as MetroPCS or Royal Street Communications Cricket comes up as Cricket or Leap Wireless So, an investigator who gets a hit through NPA/NXX data showing a cell phone is with a major cell service like Verizon should heed warning. He may subpoena the records, only to find it’s been leased to Tracfone. A new subpoena is directed at Tracfone, only to learn that no subscriber information is on file. In the two weeks it took to get subpoena results returned from the phone companies, the bad guy has since tossed the phone out the car window and already has a new one. The investigator might be feeling like he’s been tossed out the window, too. Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of "The Investigator's Little Black Book." Reprint permission. CRIME SMASHER WEBSITE RELEASED! Private Investigators and others who have a need to run online criminal background checks now have a new way to get more in-depth information. CrimeSmasher.com , the newest website by P.I. Robert Scott offers not only traditional criminal records, but also records from two new sources that simply weren't available outside of law enforcement until recently. "What's new is the availability of private sector versions of the FBI's wants and warrants and arrest reports," said Scott, a Los Angeles-based private investigator and creator of several high-traffic websites for investigators. "It used to be you simply couldn't access this non-conviction information unless you had a police badge. You were stuck with criminal court convictions, for the most part. Now, there's tens of millions of records of these new types of records available. The data has been collected one jurisdiction at a time by public record aggregators who had the foresight to look into the future and see that one day this data would eventually have value." He said by combining these new criminal record types with traditional ones, Crime Smasher offers a newer, more in-depth way to uncover criminal history information. Crime Smasher can be found at CrimeSmasher.com . No membership is required to use the website. Reprint permission.

Products & services

Similar companies nearby