“A real locate puts the investigative professional to the proof. You need a Swiss army knife full of tools for each circumstance.” —Avi Klein
Avi Klein is a private investigator in Oakland, California with a law degree from USC. He’s also a former Investigative journalist who covered the finance, defense, and national security industries. Now, he’s managing partner at the Klein Group, a firm specializing in litigation support, due diligence for investors, locating heirs, and defending contested wills.
His LinkedIn page is a fantastic resource. He shares really good information about the investigative world, from due diligence to skip tracing. In one post, Avi writes about real locates: assignments to find people who are tough to trace, like the unhoused recent College grads, and other people who change addresses frequently. A real locate puts the investigative professional to the proof, he says. You need a Swiss army knife full of tools for each circumstance.
I love that. It really captures the investigator’s skillset. In this interview, we talked about Avi’s Swiss army knife of skills. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation. —Hal Humphreys
Transcript Highlights:
(Heavily edited for brevity & clarity.)
Origin Story
HAL HUMPHREYS:
Avi, tell us about your background.
AVI KLEIN:
I was in law school, and I realized very early on, I didn’t want to practice law. I just did not see myself as a corporate lawyer. Instead, I went to Washington, D.C. and became a journalist. Basically, my entire career has been in public records research, bothering people on the phone, and getting them to talk to me when they shouldn’t. I worked on political campaigns for several years. And I had the sense there was something called “corporate investigations.” I found a connection with the Mintz Group, and I talked myself into a job.
I worked there for about four and a half years. I did a lot of due diligence work, and I also learned a lot about the business of Investigations, which I think is often overlooked. think it’s really important for people, if they’re thinking about going out on their own, to understand where the money is made, how to work with clients, and how to operate effectively in a corporate world, Mintz was a great place to learn the business.
HUMPHREYS:
I came up through the real estate appraisal world. The skill set is identical to the skill set of being an investigative journalist or being an investigator. When you said, “I spent a lot of time on the phone calling people and pestering them for information that they don’t necessarily want to share,” as a commercial valuation professional, that’s all I did. It’s not an easy thing. It is a really important skill set that I fear is being lost.
KLEIN:
Can you call up a court clerk in Wichita and get her to send over some court records right now, and sweet-talk them into doing that for you in an authentic way?
HUMPHREYS:
I you’re in rural Tennessee and you go to the courthouse on a Wednesday, you better get there before noon, because the courthouse closes at noon on Wednesdays. You’ve got to know those kinds of things.
So, you worked with the Mintz Group. Tell us about that.
KLEIN:
The Mintz Group is big international investigations firm, founded by a guy named Jim Mintz, who’s a fantastic fellow. He was part of the same world, contemporary with guys like Jules Kroll and Nardello and a bunch of guys who came out or the 1970s as investigative journalists, or having worked on the Watergate committee as investigators — jobs like that. And they realized they could make a lot more money if they would sell their services to the burgeoning private equity business that was developing in New York in the early 1980s, and in the defense and the growing consulting business that was taking over Washington, D.C. starting in sort of the mid to late 80s. And they built out these really fantastic investigations businesses. And what distinguished Mintz, I think, from these others was they emphasized hiring very creative people to work for them. There were colleagues of mine that had written books, that were working on screenplays, doing all kinds of creative things. They were not former cops or FBI. They were just creative thinkers who knew their way around not just public records, not just sources, but also with the language. Because one of the things the Mintz group also really emphasized was very clear writing and testing what you’ve written down. So, you know, you write up a memo for the partner, then they’re like, “How do you know that?”
Because there’s a tendency to kind of round off the edges of what we know to sound more confident. And they would say, No. I we don’t know entirely, we just say we don’t know entirely. But we say what we do know from right up front. It was fantastic training in how to do this work and work it as a business.
HUMPHREYS:
If you don’t make money, you cannot continue to do investigations. It’s a real struggle to get your head around the business side.
So, tell us a little bit about the Klein Group and what it specializes in.
KLEIN:
The industry had been shifting to high end due diligence work, and I didn’t like it very much. I like the things that lawyers do, but I didn’t want to fight over discovery all the time. I don’t like people being angry with me.
So, when I went out of my own, my business strategy was to say, I think there’s a market in the middle, between the guys doing retail work, surveillance projects, things like that and these very, very high-end companies. I wanted to bring that same skill set to budget-conscious attorneys who are not going to hire Kroll or Mintz.
I really like working with attorneys on fact-gathering. Their job is to apply the law to the facts. They tend not to be very good at finding out the facts outside of the discovery process. They always want to wait for discovery to resolve any kind of factual holes in their cases.
I talked to lawyers and said, look, you can get better facts for your cases right now. There’s a whole universe of information about the parties, their history, their relationships, how much money they have and whether they might be able to pay off a judgment, assuming you get one. There are factual claims we can go and test right now. You’re going to do all this thing with discovery and fight with opposing counsel, that’s going to take you a whole year before you get anything useful, and it’s also very expensive to process all the discovery. But we can get in right away, long before discovery is a question, and start compiling facts.
The more a lawyer has on the table before discovery, the better job they can do of crafting discovery, because they can ask for something specifically if they know about it. And if they don’t get it, then they can say, “We already know this document exists. How come you didn’t turn it over?”
So now, as far as my practice goes, it’s about 75% litigation, 25 due diligence. And that works out really well for me.
Skip Tracing and Locates
HUMPHREYS:
Let’s talk about skip tracing and locates. What is a skip trace? What is a “locate”?
KLEIN:
A skip trace is where the word “skip” is in there — a person skipping town, or skipping bail, where they owe somebody money and somebody’s chasing after them to get that money. That’s what happens when you skip bail, you’ve lost money for the bail bondsman, and he’s got to go get you an order so he can get his bond redeemed.
A skip trace really means a person who is evading. They are doing everything they can to avoid being caught. I want to distinguish that from what I do, which is what I call “locates.” The person is not trying to escape from anyone. I’m not doing bail bond recovery, and I’m not doing debt collection. My clients are lawyers. They need an address on a guy or gal because either they have to serve them or they have to send them a letter, and for some reason, they have no idea where the guy might be. They haven’t put any effort into it.
A lot of times in cases like that, it’s pretty easy. For most people who aren’t evading, the database report is going to give you what you want. But there are cases where they sent a process server, and it didn’t work. Often these can be more complicated. There are cases where people who are homeless or college students and recently divorced people, where you have to do a little bit more work. And we’re going to talk about the tool set.
But I think the main distinguishing feature between a locate and a skip trace is: with a skip trace, the person is evading. With a locate, the problem is on your end. You just don’t have a good address for him. You’re going to have to put in some work to find it.
HUMPHREYS:
The harder a person is to find, you start to build this narrative in your mind that they’re evading you, and they’re really not.
KLEIN:
One thing lawyers often overlook is you can just call the guy and say, “Hey, I have legal papers for you. Could we just arrange to meet?” With professional people, this will often work. They know you don’t gain anything from evading service. You’re going to get served eventually.
Ethics and Liability of Locates
HUMPHREYS:
When you’re doing locates, there are some liability issues. There’s a famous case where a private investigator tracked down a young lady for an individual. Turns out, the individual was her ex-boyfriend. He killed her, and the PI was held criminally responsible. So, let’s talk about the liability and legalities of skip tracing and locates.
KLEIN:
I get calls like this both from potential retail clients, and even from lawyers, who will tell me, “I’m trying to track down my friend from 20 years ago, and they want to make sure they’re okay, or maybe try to re-engage the relationship. And I always tell people, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I think this is the ethical standard: If you want me to find a person — there’s no litigation involved; we’re not talking about process service — I’m happy to find a person. But I’m going to contact them and tell them that you are looking for them, and ask them if they want me to put them in touch. And every single time, the person says, “Never mind.”
For the locates I do, 99.99% of them are for lawyers who are giving me lawful papers. So I don’t really worry about the ethical issues there, but I am always very conscious. I don’t do the process serving myself. But it is really important when you’re working with other people to make sure that they understand some of the ethical issues involved here. Namely, we are not trespassing anywhere, and we are obeying all laws, and we are not making any scenes. We’re not embarrassing anyone. We’re not doing anything that’s not the work of serving paper.
Favorite Tools
HUMPHREYS:
Let’s talk about some tools you use.
KLEIN:
Databases are always a very good place to start. You want to start broad and kind of narrow and funnel a little bit. A skilled investigator will pull a report like TLO and start sizing up the person a little bit just based on that. It’s not everything. There’s lots of other work to be done. But if there’s real valuable data in there, you get a sense of, who is this person? Is this a person who moves a lot? Or, “Huh. This guy likes to buy and sell property a lot. I see a lot of real estate transactions with this guy, or I see a bunch of tax liens all of a sudden. Maybe this guy is under some sort of financial stress. That could tell us something.”
Yeah, you’re looking for that kind of stuff to give yourself an initial impression of who the person is. You can’t be wedded to it. But you want to have something to guide you. You don’t want to just start mindlessly running searches in a checklist kind of way. Our clients do not pay us to mechanically run searches. What they pay for is our brains, our ability to take all this information and leverage it in an efficient way to get the right result.
HUMPHREYS:
Databases. What databases do you like?
KLEIN:
I use TLO as my primary. I think it has very good California coverage, and I’m used to it. I have IDI which I think is fine. I have Delvepoint. I have Tracers, which I think is very, very good for phone numbers. I also have a full Nexus subscription, a full Westlaw subscription. And then a bunch of small little one-off, kind of things to get DMV records or change of address form information or real estate records.
HUMPHREYS:
So, you’ve got a difficult locate. One of the things you shared on LinkedIn, you got some discovery before it was actually required to be turned over from a DA, and they had redacted a lot of information about the person. But you were able to find out their name and get in touch with them. Talk to us about that.
KLEIN:
So, you’re doing a tough locate, you’re looking to find anything that’s real. You’re trying to find something where you can establish that at least on that particular date, that person was in this place. They might not be there anymore, but then you at least have a place where they started. And then maybe you can find a change of address form from there to see where they went.
You’re looking for that little piece of information that’s going to get you to the next phase. Something solid you can hold onto. And sometimes you have to overcome the efforts of other people to try to hide that from you. Sometimes it’s the person themselves. They’re hiding, and you got to find something that’s going to direct you to their address. I
In this case that you’re describing, this was a white-collar defense case, and the other side had a confidential witness. They’re not telling us who the confidential witness is. But as part of sort of the early stages of discovery, long before they’re going to have to identify this guy who turned on my client, they had to turn over the arrest records from when that guy was arrested. And they had dutifully redacted all the personal information about the guy, the name the date of birth. His address is social security number. But these were arrest records. And on it was a booking number. They didn’t redact the booking number. They were probably not thinking the booking number could connect that piece of paper to a real person. But in this jurisdiction, you can go to the online sheriff’s office or the jail roster and search for a person by the booking number.
Once I saw that booking number, it was a half an hour of work to find and identify this confidential witness, all because of this one little nugget of information. And now my client is nine months ahead of where he would have been in developing a defense.
I think the concept of leverage is really important: a lever works by putting a small thing under a big thing to lift it. And that’s where you’re looking for. That small little thing that’s going to lift up your case and get you to the next stage.
HUMPHREYS:
Social media. What your idea of best practices for social media research?
KLEIN:
What I’m using social media for, particularly with locates, is I’m trying to confirm information that I already have but I’m not sure about. his happens. You’ve got an address that you think might be good, a person who’s moving a lot, and you’re not sure exactly where they are. The databases are a little confused. It’s got to be one of these addresses — the person’s not hiding — but you’re not really sure which one.
People like to post about their day-to-day lives. People post pictures of their kids on Instagram or they show themselves outside the balcony of their house. That’s what I’m looking for. if I can get a picture of where this person lives, I can probably find a picture of their house or their apartment or an apartment in the same complex on the internet. Redfin is a gold mine of imagery inside people’s houses. Also for apartment listings. An apartment building is often going to have a big website. And the kitchen has got all kinds of things in it that are unique — that countertop, those types of cabinets, the location of the refrigerator or the sink. And if I can get a glimpse of that on your Instagram, because you posted a picture of yourself making a rigatoni, then I can leverage that, and then I know exactly where you are. That’s how I use it for the most part.
The other way you use it is to try to figure out, who knows this person? If you could identify another person who lives with that person, you also have a real edge. So, I want to know, if this person’s not married, what’s her boyfriend’s name? Maybe all the utilities are in her boyfriend’s name.
HUMPHREYS:
There are a lot of nuggets in in this Swiss army knife of tools: Court filings.
KLEIN:
Supercritical. The first thing you want to look for aside from databases are court filings. We’re looking for a real record where a person has made a statement about where they live. And if you could find a recent court filing that they’ve been involved with. Maybe they’ve been divorced. The person has moved out, but maybe there’s a new address on there. Or where this becomes really critical is with people who are mentally ill and homeless. Your best shot is not in the databases. All this data comes from the credit system and mail order, and they’re not doing any of that. They’re in a cash world and they have a cell phone, they’re doing prepaid cards.
But the truth is that homeless people and the mentally ill rub up against the criminal and civil justice system all the time. Maybe there’s a police report which says he usually hangs out by such and such a subway station. A lot of information into a court filing that you can leverage on.
HUMPHREYS:
Phone registrations.
KLEIN:
This is where Tracers is really good. A person has a cell phone bill even if they don’t have a utility bill at that house. And finding out through Tracers that this is a cell phone, and that the billing is associated with that address — it’s not proof. But it’s a good way to tie a person down, with a person who doesn’t otherwise have utilities at an address.
HUMPHREYS:
Press archives are really good source for information.
KLEIN:
I use them a lot if I’m doing something for a will and trust attorney. I’ll do these genealogical searches where there’s nothing adversarial. but a person died intestate. He has no children. His parents are long dead, something is happening with the will. and they need to notice the heirs. But this guy was estranged from his family from the time he was 18, before WWII, and the people who are dealing with it now have no idea if he has any relatives or not.
I find ancestry.com and newspapers.com, when you marry them together, to be very, very effective. In the olden days, it was much more common for people to submit voluminous obituaries to newspapers, and every obituary has a long list of people that survived the deceased.
HUMPHREYS:
Are LPR databases of repo companies searchable?
KLEIN:
Yes. License plate readers mounted by repo companies are an unbelievable and troubling resource for private investigators. We’re not talking about license plate readers that are mounted on police cars and parking enforcement vehicles and when you go through a toll booth.
What we’re talking about: the repo industry are very motivated to know where all the cars are that they might want to repo. And so there’s a company that mounts these readers on the tow trucks — they have a revenue sharing model with all the tow truck companies. And then the tow trucks go around all day doing their tow truck business. But if they spot the license plate response, a car that is due to be repoed. the tow truck guy can snag it right then and get his bounty.
And they figured they could sell the data to private investigators to help them find people. TThe data is public. You don’t have any right to privacy in public in this way. Not only that: license plates don’t even belong to you. They belong to the DMV. So, in a legal sense, you have no cause to complain.
So, if I want to go find a person and it’s causing me a lot of grief, for $20 or so I can run this search, and I’ve got the license plate. Now, I make a DMV request for all the cars that are associated with this guy, and they send that to me. Then I go to my other vendor, and I get the make and the model. But what I need is the plate. And then I put my plate into this license plate reader database, and it shows me every place where the LPR trucks have spotted the car.
If you see a pattern where the plate is being picked up in the same apartment parking lot all the time or on the same street every morning, then you’ve got a lead.
Similar to that is parking ticket data. Say, you want to go and pay your parking ticket, but you lost those tickets. But you know your license plate, so they let you search by that. So I can search for license plate, and it will show me all the places you got tickets. If I see a bunch of tickets for wrong side of the street parking for street sweeping, well, that is a ticket that you really only ever get at your own house. Well, now I’ve narrowed down to where you live at least to that block.
HUMPHREYS:
I hear people freak out about LPRs, and I get it. But the privacy ship has sailed.
KLEIN:
You can’t do these types of database searches in any other country in the world. It’s only in the United States where there’s an overall policy notion, that you have no right to privacy outside your home, and where you live is not a private issue. I’m more inclined to think we should be more like Europe, and I should not be allowed to do all the things that I do. But until they stop me, I’m going to keep doing it.
HUMPHREYS:
As long as it’s available and it’s legal, it’s a valid way to locate people.
Let’s move on to professional license registrations.
KLEIN:
If you’re looking for somebody who is a professionally, licensed person — a doctor or a lawyer, a nurse, a professional engineer — if you move, you’re supposed to update them with a new address. And that’s a little thing where a person has themselves gone and affirmatively stated where they are, and anything like that is worth checking.
HUMPHREYS:
My favorite: real estate records.
KLEIN:
Totally critical. Usually a person lives in a house that they own, if they own property.
But also, more importantly, there’s a lot of data in the filings themselves. Typically, the deed itself is going to be recorded with a number, and the deed of trust or the mortgage is going to have the next number in sequence because they’re going to be filed in that order. So, if you don’t know the mortgage number, you just add one. to the deed number, and you’ve probably got the mortgage.
A mortgage is going to have two things that are really valuable to you: One: a signature exemplar. The seller signs the deed, but the mortgage gets signed by the person who’s now indebted to the mortgage company. So that could be very useful for identifying the right person, eliminating false positives. If you have a common name, getting a real signature exemplar tthat you can compare to some other court document — you’re not sure it’s the same guy who was involved in that lawsuit, and now you see a signature and that they match.
Secondly, anytime a person files a deed with the County Registrar, there’s a little thing which says, “Send all mail to.” A person might buy a house as an investment property, but they don’t want the County Recorder’s mail and information of the tax assessor going there. There’s a tenant going to be there. So there’ll be a different address on the “send the mail to,” and that also could provide a very valuable clue as to where the person is living.
HUMPHREYS:
Nice, very nice. Venmo payments. How can we use this?
KLEIN:
The default settings on Venmo are contrary to all established privacy practices: they make all your transactions and your connections public to anyone who’s using it. Unless you affirmatively change the settings — and you have to change them separately, both the settings about your transactions and the settings about who your contacts are — because it pulls your contacts from your email. You should take care of this right away.
HUMPHREYS:
I’m going to fix this right now!
KLEIN:
I can see if you are transacting with a person on there. I can just put your email into my phone and resync it. Now you’re in there. I’ve just got to find your account in Venmo. And then if I can see your transactions, I’m getting some information. Who knows you?
HUMPHREYS:
I’m looking at Venmo right now at people I’m not connected with, but they’re connected with people that I’m connected with. Little emojis saying sushi, RV payment, birthday at Kien Giang. Dresser we broke. All kinds of information right there publicly available.
KLEIN:
I started going through my Venmo account, and I saw that many many investigators and high-end attorneys that I knew had totally open privacy settings. And I was learning things about the personal lives of people that I know. And that was one of my first LinkedIn posts, was to say, “Hey everyone, you got to just pay attention to this.
HUMPHREYS:
Every day, I learn something new. A
Now, another one of my all-time favorites: the very first the situation that got me into the PI business involved this little trick, and it is notary books.
KLEIN:
I think notary books are the hidden gem of investigations. So, when a person signs a document with a notary, what do they ask for? Your driver’s license. And then they take out this big official book, and they write down all your information off your driver’s license on it, including your address. In California, they’re also supposed to write down where the notary signing took place. And you sign it, and in California, you give a fingerprint.
Most people have absolutely no idea that the notary book — it’s called a “notary public,” and the notary is actually in a very unusual legal position in which they have to give up the notary line if you request it. You can’t ask for the whole book and just photocopy it, but if you have a specific document that you’re looking for, you can ask. And they have just like a $2/page charge, a very minimal de minimis charge. And they have 15 days, and they’ve got to send you a photocopy, completely unredacted, of that line.
Let’s say I’ve got a property record that you were on that you signed. That’s the most common source of something notarized. Then I can just send an email to that notary, and now I’m going to get back the address that’s on your driver’s license. I’m going to get a signature exemplar. And if I’m lucky, I’m also going to find out where the notary book was signed. That could be a different place than what’s on your driver’s license. But that could be the place where you live, especially nowadays, where mobile notaries are very common for real estate transactions. People aren’t going into the land title office anymore. The mobile notary comes and they’ve got contracts with all the deed and title companies. And where that gets signed is incredibly valuable information.
HUMPHREYS:
An attorney friend called me. He knew I was a commercial real estate appraiser, and he had a client whose husband was hiding some properties. He said, “Can you find where he’s got himself out of owning properties and shunted them to other ownership forms?” But one of the things that broke it wide open is the same notary public had notarized every one of the documents that I found. So we were able to go to that notary public, get a subpoena for her, and then have her bring the notary book and find 20 other properties that this guy had over the past year and a half shunted off to fake corporations. So, yeah, notary books are amazing.
The last couple: surveillance, canvassing, and other gumshoe work. How do you use those?
KLEIN:
In the end, you really have to just wait for a person to be where you think that they are. And they don’t always cooperate. They’re living their own lives. And if your process server isn’t able to just knock on the door and do it, then you have to just sit on the house or sit on the post office box and wait for the guy to show up. You can send a package so he gets an alert that he’s got a package waiting for him and just wait outside for the guy to show up to get his package.
Source inquiries. Lawyers are often very skittish about this. They don’t want to alert. There’s a certain element of it that feels a little bit like trickery. But I had plenty of success just calling up someone’s landlord and asking, “Hey, does this guy still live there?” And landlords are usually very interested in the financial and legal condition of their tenants. So if you call them up and say, “I’m working with some people and we’re trying to sue your tenant,” that’s something they want to know about. So they will say, you know, “He just moved out,” or whatever.
HUMPHREYS:
Networks of other investigators. Talk about how you use your network.
KLEIN:
I rely very heavily on investigators I know and have worked with over the last five years I’ve been on my own — partly for ideas, partly of for resources. Especially when I get outside of California. I’m not very familiar with how the laws work, what court records would be available, what kind of DMV records, am I allowed to obtain? And what you want is somebody like Steve Mason in Arizona, people like that who know that world. I’ve found a lot of professional courtesy, just like, “Hey, can you just answer this question?” And anyone can call me from any other state and say, “What’s the status of getting DMV records in California?” or “What’s going to happen if I go down to the courthouse in Alameda County? What can I get there?”
And then, of course, you really need it for when you’ve got to do a serve or a surveillance or something like that, and you’ve got to find someone. Because in the end, you’ve got to get results for the client.
Six months ago, I located a woman, through a whole complex series of steps, but I was pretty sure she was living in France, and I had an address in some random little town somewhere. And I had to work my network to find a guy who was in that area of France. I didn’t know anyone, but I have a network of people that do. And through that network, I was able to find a really good guy who was able to go and knock on the door and find this lady. And I couldn’t have done that without my network. And you can’t go back to the client and say, “Well I think they’re in France, so, you know, hopefully you have someone in France.”
HUMPHREYS:
Avi, I cannot thank you enough. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with you. Tell people real quick, what’s the easiest way to find you?
KLEIN:
Find me on LinkedIn. If you search for “Avi Klein investigator” on LinkedIn, I am the only private investigator named Avi Klein in all of America. There are lots of other Avi Kleins doing interesting things, but I’m the only private investigator. And I look exactly like how I look here, and I’m even wearing the same hat and glasses, so they’ll be no mistake.