Often, when I am talking to potential Private Investigator clients, I refer to something called a “Ghost Car.” This blog post is going to explain what a Ghost Car is and how I typically use them. A Ghost Car was an invention I came up with several years ago when I was working on a bounty hunter case. I don’t know if other investigators use them, or what they might call them.
My first use of a Ghost Car involved a fugitive who we weren’t entirely sure was in the state, and if they were, we didn’t know their location. I’m not always a fan of knocking on doors and asking questions without any real hard proof of where a person is staying. If you guess wrong, you may have just burned the element of surprise. A “skip” who is walking around thinking they are safe since they relocated to RI would now be on the lookout and might run again.
What we started to do was place hidden cameras inside a car, parking that car close enough to see the door of a person of interest from the hidden camera. We would leave it parked beside that door. We would typically park this car outside for 24 hours and then either swap it out for another car with a hidden camera or bring it back. We would examine the footage to see if there was any sighting of our suspect. This allowed us to have “eyes” on a particular area without having a person watching it. This cut the overall cost of the investigation for our clients and lowered the chances of someone figuring out that we were watching them. Honestly, how suspicious is it if you just see a car parked a few houses away among other cars?
The technology has dramatically improved since I started with my first Ghost Car. When we first started using Ghost Cars, I would hide a camera inside a tissue box or a stuffed animal. We had potential of running into visibility issue and blind spots. Now, with the popularity of dash cameras, I don’t have to hide them at all. We just wire the dash camera to a fuse on the car battery that does not shut off when the car is not running. We also have the ability to set up a camera that is streaming to our dispatch office. This way, we can have eyes at multiple locations. We can also now have a Ghost Car with a 360-degree view. We no longer need to be behind the house. We can leave one car parked for several days and not worry about running out of battery life or footage.
One of the other benefits of a Ghost Car is that we can establish a pattern of when a person leaves and returns to a property. For example, if we see them leave the house every day after 1 PM, then we know that when we are ready to actually start our fieldwork, our arrival time should be optimized to minimize the chances of us just sitting around and getting made. With the Ghost Cars that have live streaming capabilities, we can wait for a person of interest to leave a few streets away. Thus, we are a lot less likely to be burned. We just catch up with the vehicle when it comes onto the street where we are waiting.
I will make a more detailed video for our YouTube channel. This video will allow us to show you in what situations we may want to use a Ghost Car. Keep an eye out on our channel.
Common Questions customers ask me about the use of Ghost Cars:
Q: Why is it called a Ghost Car? A: The car has a “ghost investigator” inside of it. No, really, I don’t know if other private investigators use them, and if so, what the proper terminology is for them. I highly doubt I am the first one to have ever thought of this, but if I am, maybe we can start calling them “Kreymer Cars” in the industry.
Q: How are Ghost Cars Legal? A: As long as I am not recording in a place where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then I am operating inside the law. It’s no different than me asking a neighbor if I can look at their Ring doorbell camera.
Q: Did you catch your Fugative? Turns out that the intelligence we had that the Fugitive fled to his father house was bad. I am glad we didn’t dedicate several days of man hours doing surveillance. I am also glad we didn’t make contact with the father because that may have got back to the fugitive that people were searching for them, thus the other team would have had a harder time.
For all other questions, comments, or thoughts on names for Ghost Cars, please email [email protected]
