Frequently asked questions — Special Solutions, Ltd.

Question 1

What does Special Solutions, Ltd. actually do?

Accepted Answer

We establish facts and document them so they can be used. In practice that means surveillance, background and asset research, corporate and internal-theft investigations, insurance and workers’ compensation claims, criminal defense work, executive protection, electronic counter-measures, service of process and locates. A large share of our work comes from attorneys and insurers, and the rest directly from private individuals and businesses. The method is the same either way: agree what can realistically be established, go and establish it, and hand over a written record that survives being argued about.

Question 2

Is it legal to hire a private investigator?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Engaging a licensed private detective agency is entirely lawful, and it is done every day by attorneys, insurers, employers and private individuals. What matters is that the investigator is licensed and that the work itself stays inside the law. Illinois licenses this profession precisely so that there is a standard to hold people to, and a license that can be taken away. Several of the answers further down this page are about the lines we do not cross, and why.

Question 3

Are you licensed, and how do I check?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Special Solutions, Ltd. holds Illinois Detective Agency License #117-00691. The number is printed at the foot of every page of this website on purpose — so that you can check it rather than take our word for it. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation publishes a free license look-up on its own website. Search the agency name or the license number there and you see the license and its status directly from the State, not from us. We would encourage you to do that with any firm you are considering, including this one.

Question 4

Why does it matter that your president sits on a state board?

Accepted Answer

John C. Frycek serves on the Illinois Private Detective, Private Alarm, Private Security, Fingerprint Vendor and Locksmith Board — the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation body that licenses, regulates and disciplines this profession in Illinois. It is less a sales point than a constraint. Very few investigators in Illinois help write and enforce the standards their own industry is held to, and a firm whose president sits on that board has rather more to lose than most from cutting a corner.

Question 5

What happens on the first call?

Accepted Answer

You describe the situation and we listen. Then we tell you what we think can realistically be established, roughly how long it ought to take, and what it is likely to cost. If we think the money would be wasted, we say so — it is a short conversation that saves everyone a great deal. The initial consultation is free and in confidence, whether or not you go on to engage us. Nothing is reported to anybody, and no file is opened unless you ask for one.

Question 6

What should I have ready before I call?

Accepted Answer

Nothing, if you would rather just talk it through. But if you have them to hand, these are the things that shorten the first conversation and sharpen the quote. What you need to know — the actual question, not the whole backstory; Who the subject is: full name, approximate age, address if you have it; Vehicles, where they work, and the hours and days that matter; Whether there is a court deadline, a hearing date or a filing to meet; Whether anybody has already looked into this, and what happened; Whether the subject has any reason to think they are being looked at.

Question 7

Do I need a lawyer before I hire an investigator?

Accepted Answer

Not in order to engage us. But if your matter is heading for a courtroom — a dissolution, a custody dispute, a claim, a criminal charge — you are better served by having counsel involved early, and by letting us work to their theory of the case. There is a practical reason as well as a legal one. An attorney can tell you what will actually help your position, which is not always the same as what you most want to know. Investigating the wrong question thoroughly is an expensive way to get nowhere.

Question 8

How much does a private investigator cost in Illinois?

Accepted Answer

We do not publish rates, and we would be wary of a firm that does. A figure on a web page becomes a quote a client expects to be held to, and there is no single honest number that covers both a two-hour service of process and a six-week corporate investigation. What you are charged for is straightforward: time in the field, travel, any specialist equipment a particular job requires, and the preparation of the report. Surveillance is the largest variable, because it is bought by the hour and the hours that matter are dictated by the subject’s life rather than ours. Describe the matter on the telephone and you will get a realistic figure, a scope, and an honest view of whether it is worth spending. That conversation costs nothing.

Question 9

How does the billing work?

Accepted Answer

Work is scoped and agreed before it begins, and in most cases it runs against a retainer. You know the rate, what is included, and what happens if the job runs longer than expected — before an investigator leaves the office, not afterwards. We would rather agree a limited first phase and come back to you than open an unbounded engagement. It keeps you in control of the spend, and it keeps us honest about what each phase actually achieved.

Question 10

How long does an investigation take?

Accepted Answer

It depends almost entirely on what is being established. A locate or a background enquiry is often a matter of days. Surveillance to establish a pattern — cohabitation, a second job, the hours a parent actually keeps — usually needs several separate days or evenings, because one day proves very little and a judge knows it. Corporate matters and anything international run longer, and we will tell you so at the outset rather than discover it later.

Question 11

Can you guarantee a result?

Accepted Answer

No, and nor can anybody else. We can guarantee the standard of the work: that the hours are actually worked, that what we observe is recorded properly, and that you are told the truth about what we found. What we cannot guarantee is that the facts will be the ones you are hoping for, or that a court will draw the conclusion you want from them. An investigator who promises an outcome is promising something that is not theirs to give.

Question 12

What if you don’t find anything?

Accepted Answer

It happens, and it is a real answer rather than a failure. A great deal of surveillance documents an entirely ordinary week, and that record has value — in a maintenance or custody matter, a careful account of five days in which nothing improper happened is sometimes exactly the answer somebody needed. What we will not do is keep billing in the hope that something turns up. If we think further hours are unlikely to change the picture, we tell you, and you decide.

Question 13

Can I stop partway through?

Accepted Answer

Yes. It is your matter and your money. Tell us to stand down and we stop, account for the hours worked, and give you what we have. People sometimes stop because they already have the answer — one evening of surveillance can settle a question that was meant to take a week. That is a good outcome, not a wasted engagement.

Question 14

How does surveillance actually work?

Accepted Answer

An investigator takes up a position from which the subject can lawfully be observed and records what happens — times, locations, movements, vehicles, who the subject is with — as it happens, with photography and video where they can be taken. It is unglamorous, and it is mostly waiting. The skill is in choosing the hours that will actually answer the question, holding a position without becoming conspicuous, staying with a moving subject through traffic, and writing the log as events occur rather than reconstructing it later from memory. A reconstructed log is the first thing a competent cross-examination takes apart.

Question 15

What does a surveillance report contain?

Accepted Answer

A written narrative of each period of observation — the dates, the start and finish times, the locations, and what was seen, set out in the order it happened. A timed log of events, written contemporaneously in the field; Photographs and video, with the original unedited files preserved; Vehicles and plates where they are relevant and were observed; Addresses and premises visited, and how long the subject stayed; The identity of the investigator who made each observation; A plain statement of what was not observed, and when nothing happened.

Question 16

Will the evidence hold up in court?

Accepted Answer

Whether any particular piece of evidence is admitted is decided by the judge, on your attorney’s argument. No investigator can promise admissibility, and you should be wary of one who does. What we control is the quality of the record, which is usually what the question turns on: notes made at the time rather than later, original image and video files kept unaltered alongside any working copies, a clear account of who held the material throughout, and an investigator who can be put on the stand and cross-examined about every line of it.

Question 17

Do private investigators testify? Will yours?

Accepted Answer

Yes, when the matter requires it. The investigator who did the work is the investigator who testifies to it — we do not hand a file to somebody who was not there and ask them to speak to it. Knowing from the outset that a report may have to be defended under oath changes the way it is written, which is rather the point.

Question 18

Will the person know they are being watched?

Accepted Answer

The work is done so that they do not. Our investigators are experienced at holding a position and following a subject without drawing attention, and that is most of what the fee buys. We will not promise invisibility, because nobody honestly can. If a subject is already alert — because they have been followed before, because somebody has warned them, or because of the kind of work they do — we say so and adjust the approach. And if we believe we have been noticed, you hear it from us immediately, not in a deposition.

Question 19

Do I get the photographs and video?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Stills and video form part of the report, and the original files are preserved so that there can be no argument later about whether an image was altered. Not every engagement produces a photograph worth having — surveillance at night, in heavy traffic, or into a building produces a great deal of nothing. The log carries the weight in those cases, which is why it is written the way it is.

Question 20

Can a private investigator record a conversation in Illinois?

Accepted Answer

Illinois is one of the states that requires the consent of all parties to record a private conversation. That is a significant restriction, and it applies to you as much as to us. So we do not make covert audio recordings of private conversations, and we would strongly advise you not to either without speaking to your attorney first. People arrive with a recording they made themselves, believing it to be their best evidence, and discover that it has become the biggest problem in their case. Video is a different question. Observing and photographing what is plainly visible from a place we are lawfully entitled to be is the ordinary business of this profession, and it is what surveillance consists of.

Question 21

Can you put a GPS tracker on someone’s car?

Accepted Answer

No. We do not place tracking devices on a vehicle belonging to somebody else. Illinois restricts it, and it is not a corner we are willing to cut. There is a tactical reason as well as a legal one. In a family case, evidence obtained that way tends to become the subject of the hearing: the other side stops defending their conduct and starts attacking yours, and you lose the ground you walked in with.

Question 22

Can you get phone records, bank records or medical records?

Accepted Answer

No. Telephone records and financial records are protected, and obtaining them by pretext — telephoning the company and pretending to be the account holder — is a federal crime. Medical records are protected as well. Anybody who offers to get them for you is telling you something important about how they operate. Asset and income research is done properly, from lawful sources: public filings, recorded property instruments, court and judgment records, corporate and licensing records, and our own field work. It is slower than a pretext call, and it is the only version of the answer that is any use to you afterwards.

Question 23

Can you get into an email account, a phone, or social-media messages?

Accepted Answer

No. Accessing somebody’s account, device or messages without authority is a computer crime under both state and federal law, and installing monitoring software on a phone that is not yours is no different. What is publicly posted is public, and we look at it. The locked parts stay locked.

Question 24

Will you follow someone onto private property?

Accepted Answer

No. We work from public vantage points and from places we are lawfully entitled to be. An investigator who trespasses for one photograph hands the other side a reason to attack everything else in the file, and a reason to attack you for having commissioned it. One image is never worth that.

Question 25

Do you have police powers?

Accepted Answer

None. A licensed private investigator is a civilian. We cannot arrest or detain anybody, we cannot compel a person to answer a question, and we cannot obtain a warrant or a court order. What we have instead is time, method, equipment, and the discipline to document what we see so that somebody who does have those powers — or a judge — can act on it.

Question 26

So what can a private investigator not do?

Accepted Answer

This is the list worth reading before you hire anybody in this profession, including us. We cannot, and will not: Make an arrest, detain anyone, or compel anyone to answer questions; Obtain a warrant, or search a home, a vehicle or a phone; Tap a telephone or intercept messages; Obtain protected telephone, financial or medical records; Place a tracking device on property that is not yours; Access an account, device or private message without authority; Enter private property without the right to be there; Impersonate a police officer or any other public official; Promise that a court will admit what we find, or agree with it.

Question 27

If another firm says they can do those things, why shouldn’t I use them?

Accepted Answer

Because you would be buying evidence that cannot be used, and exposure that cannot be undone. Unlawfully obtained material tends to be excluded, and in a family or civil matter its discovery shifts the whole hearing onto your conduct instead of theirs. And the person who broke the law to get it for you becomes a witness against you from the moment the money changes hands. That is a poor position to put yourself in, whatever was in the file.

Question 28

I think my partner is having an affair. What can you establish?

Accepted Answer

Where somebody goes, when, for how long, and who they are with — documented with times, locations and photography, observed from places we are lawfully entitled to be. Most people who call about this are not looking for revenge; they are exhausted by not knowing, and the uncertainty is doing more damage than an answer would. We tell you what we observed, including when what we observed was entirely innocent. That outcome is more common than television suggests, and it is a result worth having.

Question 29

How do you prove cohabitation for maintenance or support?

Accepted Answer

By establishing a pattern rather than an incident. One overnight stay proves very little. A documented record across a number of separate days and nights is a different matter: a vehicle present overnight, the same person coming and going on an ordinary domestic routine, post and bins and belongings, arrivals and departures at the hours a resident keeps. What a court makes of that pattern is a question of law for your attorney, and the standard is theirs to argue. Our job is to make sure the factual record is thorough enough to argue from.

Question 30

What do you document in a custody or parental-fitness case?

Accepted Answer

Conduct that bears on a child’s welfare and is rarely visible in a courtroom: who is actually doing the supervising, the condition of the home, who else is present and regularly around the child, whether the hours a parent claims to keep are the hours they keep, and whether the arrangements ordered are the arrangements being followed. These are handled with particular care. Children are never approached, interviewed or treated as a subject of the investigation, and we work to your attorney’s instructions on scope.

Question 31

Will you confront my partner, or speak to them?

Accepted Answer

No. Our investigators observe and document; they do not confront, interview or approach the subject of a surveillance engagement. The moment a subject knows they are being watched, the engagement is over and the evidence stops. If a case genuinely calls for somebody to be interviewed — a witness, for instance, rather than a subject — that is a separate and deliberate step, taken with your attorney’s agreement and planned in advance.

Question 32

Can I use what you find in my divorce case?

Accepted Answer

That is for your attorney to advise on and for the judge to rule on. What we provide is a report prepared on the assumption that it may be put in front of a court and tested, which is the form that gives your attorney the most to work with. If you do not yet have counsel, get counsel. Evidence that is useful in a negotiation is not always evidence that helps at a hearing, and that judgment belongs to a lawyer, not to us.

Question 33

What do you handle for businesses?

Accepted Answer

Internal theft and shrinkage, suspected fraud, corporate and communications espionage, due diligence before a deal closes, conduct and misconduct investigations, and the counter-measures side — sweeping offices, boardrooms and vehicles for eavesdropping devices. We also take engagements relating to mergers and acquisitions, domestically and internationally, where somebody needs to know who they are actually dealing with before signing.

Question 34

We think an employee is stealing. What is the process?

Accepted Answer

Quietly, and in the right order. We would normally begin with what already exists — the records, the paper trail, the system logs, the stock discrepancies — before anybody is deployed into the field, because that is where the pattern usually shows itself and it costs least. Internal investigations carry employment-law consequences, so we expect your counsel or HR adviser to be involved in the scope from the start. A clumsy internal enquiry can create a larger problem than the theft, and the order in which things are done matters a great deal.

Question 35

Do you run background checks for hiring?

Accepted Answer

We conduct background and due-diligence investigations, yes. Where a report is to be used in making a hiring decision there are notice and consent requirements under federal and Illinois law, and specific rules about what may be considered and how an adverse decision must be handled. We scope that work to those rules and expect your HR adviser or counsel to be in the conversation. The checks are not the difficult part; using them lawfully is.

Question 36

How do you investigate a workers’ compensation or insurance claim?

Accepted Answer

By establishing what the claimant actually does, across enough separate days to show a pattern rather than one unrepresentative afternoon: activity inconsistent with a claimed restriction, unreported work, a second job, a second identity, or multiple claims across carriers. We work for insurers, risk-management departments and employers, and we report what we observe — including when what we observe is entirely consistent with the claim. A file that quietly confirms a genuine claim has saved a carrier the cost of contesting it.

Question 37

How do you work with attorneys?

Accepted Answer

To your theory of the case, on your timetable, reporting in a form you can actually use. We have served Illinois attorneys since 1991, and most of that work is repeat instruction from firms who know what they will get. In practice that means a report written in the expectation of being tested, exhibits prepared and preserved properly, the investigator available to testify, and a straight answer when the field work does not support the theory. You need to hear that before a hearing, not during one.

Question 38

What is a bug sweep, and what does it actually find?

Accepted Answer

A systematic technical and physical examination of a defined space — an office, a boardroom, a residence, a vehicle — for devices that transmit, record or relay what happens in it. It combines instrumented radio-frequency and wiring analysis with a disciplined physical search, because a recorder with no transmitter emits nothing to detect and is found by looking. A hand-held detector bought online is not this. It will find a strong transmitter sitting in the open and miss almost everything else, while leaving you with false confidence — which is worse than no sweep at all.

Question 39

What are the signs that a room or a phone is bugged?

Accepted Answer

Honestly, most of the signs people are told to look for are unreliable. Battery drain, a warm handset, odd noises on a line and unexplained data usage all have a dozen innocent explanations, and modern software leaves very little for a user to notice. The genuinely significant indicator is informational: somebody demonstrably knows something they could only have learned from a private conversation in a particular room, or from a particular device. If that has happened, a sweep is worth doing. If it has not, be wary of anybody eager to sell you one.

Question 40

What can a sweep not tell me?

Accepted Answer

A sweep is a snapshot of one place at one time, not a shield. It establishes what is present when we examine it; it cannot tell you what was there last month, and it cannot stop something being placed there next week. It also will not usually tell you who placed a device. Attribution is a separate investigation, and it rarely follows from the hardware itself. And a clear result is exactly that — a clear result for that space at that time — not a guarantee that nothing has ever been overheard.

Question 41

Where do you work?

Accepted Answer

From our office in Arlington Heights, across Chicagoland and the collar counties — Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, Kendall and McHenry — and throughout Illinois. Each of the communities we are called to most often has its own page on this site. We also take engagements nationally and internationally, which is routine for corporate and counter-measures work.

Question 42

Can you work outside Illinois?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Our license is an Illinois license, so work in another state is conducted in accordance with that state’s own licensing requirements — in many cases alongside a licensed local resource we have worked with before. We will tell you plainly which of those two it is before you engage us. An out-of-state job quoted as though it were a drive to Schaumburg is a job that is going to disappoint somebody.

Question 43

How quickly can you start?

Accepted Answer

Often within a day or two, and sooner where a hearing or a deadline is driving it. Tell us the date you are working to on the first call. Surveillance is the exception, and not for the reason people expect: the constraint is not our diary but the subject’s. If the hours that will answer your question are Thursday evenings, Thursday evening is when the work happens.

Question 44

Who actually handles my case?

Accepted Answer

Investigators of this firm, including former police detectives — our criminal investigation division is made up largely of former homicide detectives. You are told who is working your matter, and the investigator who does the work is the one who reports it and testifies to it. Your file is not farmed out to a stranger on the other side of the country and returned with a logo on it.

Question 45

How confidential is this?

Accepted Answer

Every engagement is handled in strict confidence. We do not discuss clients, we do not disclose who has instructed us, and we do not use your matter as an example to anybody. One honest limit, because you should hear it from us rather than later: confidentiality is not a legal privilege. A court can compel the production of records or testimony, and if we are ordered to produce something we will comply with the order. If privilege matters in your situation, instruct us through your attorney — that is the arrangement that gives you the most protection, and we will tell you so.

Question 46

What happens to my file afterwards?

Accepted Answer

It is retained securely for as long as there is a reason to hold it — a matter can return years later, and a report that cannot be produced is of no use to anybody. Access is restricted to the people working the file. If you want to know specifically what is held and for how long, ask. It is a fair question and we will answer it.

What we canand cannot do.

46 questions, in 8 sections

Starting out