P.I. Helps Families Stay Secure

publication date: Nov 8, 2008

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author/source: Tim Altork / STAFF

By Tim Altork / STAFF

George Taylor has been a professional private investigator since 2006.

Hanging around with George Taylor for too long can make you paranoid. His talk of fancy GPS gadgets and the latest tracking methods will quickly have you looking under your desk for hidden cameras.

He doesn’t wear a Detroit Tigers baseball cap or drive a red Ferrari around Hawaii. And the only women in his life are his wife and his 2-year-old daughter. But Taylor is a private investigator – and a good one at that.

Take, for example, the method he uses to accommodate parents who suspect that their children are doing drugs. Taylor will pose as an insurance salesman and get the parents to bring him to their house so he can talk to the entire family about insurance. (He has brochures and everything.) Once he gets the parents, who are in on the ruse, to “buy insurance” he tells them that the whole family has to have a drug test for the policy to take effect.

“If [the child] tests positive then we can get the parents and the child some help,” he said. “We have a couple of counseling services that we have relationships with.”

He runs a business called Operational Security Solutions (OPSEC Solutions, for short) that puts him on the front lines of the fight for family security.

The bulk of his business comes from husbands or wives who are suspicious that their spouse is cheating on them. Taylor uses a GPS device about the size of a pocket calculator as one of his staple tools of the trade. He gets the suspecting spouse to attach it to their husband or wife’s car and he tracks the daily patterns of where they go and who they visit.

Taylor is a certified P.I. and a member of the Georgia Association of Private Investigators. In his ongoing training he has had to learn the limitations that the law places on what you are allowed to find out about a person without their knowledge.

For example, he can’t listen in on phone conversations or look at call logs of a person’s phone without their permission.

Also, “If you are in your house and you have your doors closed I can’t go up to your fence and peek into your fence,” he said. “I can’t climb up in a tree or whatever because those aren’t normal [lines of sight].”
But he can use simple surveillance techniques and basic deductive analysis to figure out if something is awry. Particularly when a suspected cheater makes a phone call from his car early in the morning.

“You look at your watch and you see it is 5:10 in the morning,” Taylor explained. “And then the wife goes in [later] while he’s in the shower and takes his phone and looks and sees 5:10 is not there. He’s deleted it. So he’s hiding something. You know something’s going on.”

But his business encompasses a much wider range of specialties. If you think your child is getting into some Internet activity that could become unsafe, he’ll help you install spyware on their computer to monitor what they’re doing. If you want to make sure that your child isn’t skipping school or going somewhere they don’t need to go, he’ll give you a GPS device and set up a digital boundary called a Geo Fence around the school. If the child leaves that boundary you are notified by email.

If you suspect your nanny or babysitter is mistreating your children he’ll rent you a Nanny Cam and install it discreetly in your home to monitor that activity. And if you want to find a long, lost friend or track down a wayward relative, he can do that too.

While being a private investigator sometimes has him involved in some of the seedier aspects of society, he remains intent on doing things by the book and maintaining a relationship of integrity with his clients.

“We’re not going to do anything that we shouldn’t do,” he said.

And he sees what he does as a way to help families, not as a reason to needlessly dig up dirt or breed distrust. Because sometimes the doubts of fidelity are unfounded.

He had one case where a wife thought her husband was cheating on her. In actuality the husband had secretly gotten another job to help pay for an elaborate date for him and his wife on their 10th anniversary.

“She felt like crap,” Taylor said.

If there are questions that you have about your family’s security, Taylor can answer them. And he doesn’t need a genteel British boss to tell him what to do.

For more information contact Taylor at 404-394-3093 or email opsecsolutions@comcast.net.